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THE HUMAN MACHINE 



BY ARNOLD BENNETT 



Novels 

THE OLD WIVES' TALE 

HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND 

THE BOOK OF CARLOTTA 

BURIED ALIVE 

A GREAT MAN 

LEONORA 

WHOM GOD HATH JOINED 

A MAN FROM THE NORTH 

ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS 

Smaller Books 

HOW TO LIVE ON 24 HOURS A 

DAY 
THE HUMAN MACHINE 
LITERARY TASTE 
MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

Drama 

CUPID AND COMMONSENSE 
WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 



BY 

ARNOLD BENNETT 

Author of " How to Live on 24 Hours a Day" 
"The Old Wives' Tale," etc. 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



Author's Edition 

& 



WerrW fa, 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. Taking Oneself for Granted .... 7 

II. Amateurs in the Art of Living ... 15 

III. The Brain as a Gentleman-at-Large . 22 

IV. The First Practical Step 29 

V. Habit-Forming by Concentration . . 36 

VI. Lord over the Noddle 44 

VII. What " Living" chiefly is .... 51 

VIII. The Daily Friction 58 

IX. "Fire!" 65 

X. Mischievously Overworking it . . . 72 

XI. An Interlude 79 

XII. An Interest in Life 87 

XIII. Success and Failure 94 

XIV. A Man and His Environment . . . 101 
XV. L. S. D. . 109 

XVI. Reason, Reason ! 117 



TAKING ONESELF FOR 
GRANTED 

THERE are men who are capable of lov- 
ing a machine more deeply than they 
can love a woman. They are among 
the happiest men on earth. This is not a sneer 
meanly shot from cover at women. It is simply 
a statement of notorious fact. Men who worry 
themselves to distraction over the perfecting of 
a machine are indubitably blessed beyond their 
kind. Most of us have known such men. Yes- 
terday they were constructing motor-cars. But 
to-day aeroplanes are in the air — or, at any 
rate, they ought to be, according to the in- 
ventors. Watch the inventors. Invention is not 
usually their principal business. They must 
invent in their spare time. They must invent 
before breakfast, invent in the Strand between 
Lyons's and the office, invent after dinner, in- 
vent on Sundays. See with what ardour they 
rush home of a night! See how they seize a 



8 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They 
don't want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illus- 
trated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, 
hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, 
comic songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that 
are situate between a gay corsage and a picture 
hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they 
will do next. Their evenings never drag — are 
always too short. You may, indeed, catch them 
at twelve o'clock at night on the flat of their 
backs ; but not in bed ! No, in a shed, under the 
machine, holding a candle (whose paths drop 
fatness) up to the connecting-rod that is strained, 
or the wheel that is out of centre. They are con- 
tinually interested, nay, enthralled. They have 
a machine, and they are perfecting it. They get 
one part right, and then another goes wrong; 
and they get that right, and then another goes 
wrong, and so on. When they are quite sure 
they have reached perfection, forth issues the 
machine out of the shed — and in five minutes 
is smashed up, together with a limb or so of the 
inventors, just because they had been quite sure 
too soon. Then the whole business starts again. 
They do not give up — that particular wreck 
was, of course, due to a mere oversight; the 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 9 

whole business starts again. For they have 
glimpsed perfection; they have the gleam of 
perfection in their souls. Thus their lives run 
away. " They will never fly ! " you remark, cyni- 
cally. Well, if they don't? Besides, what about 
Wright? With all your cynicism, have you never 
envied them their machine and their passionate 
interest in it? 

You know, perhaps, the moment when, brush- 
ing in front of the glass, you detected your first 
grey hair. You stopped brushing; then you re- 
sumed brushing, hastily; you pretended not to 
be shocked, but you were. Perhaps you know 
a more disturbing moment than that, the mo- 
ment when it suddenly occurred to you that you 
had " arrived " as far as you ever will arrive ; 
and you had realised as much of your early 
dream as you ever will realise, and the realisation 
was utterly unlike the dream; and marriage was 
excessively prosaic and eternal, not at all what 
you expected it to be; and your illusions were 
dissipated; and games and hobbies had an un- 
pleasant core of tedium and futility; and the 
ideal tobacco-mixture did not exist; and one 
literary masterpiece resembled another; and all 
the days that are to come will more or less re- 



io THE HUMAN MACHINE 

semble the present day, until you die ; and in an 
illuminating flash you understood what all those 
people were driving at when they wrote such 
unconscionably long letters to the Telegraph as 
to life being worth living or not worth living; 
and there was naught to be done but face the 
grey, monotonous future, and pretend to be 
cheerful with the worm of ennui gnawing at 
your heart! In a word, the moment when it 
occurred to you that yours is " the common lot." 
In that moment have you not wished — do you 
not continually wish — for an exhaustless ma- 
chine, a machine that you could never get to the 
end of? Would you not give your head to be 
lying on the flat of your back, peering with a 
candle, dirty, foiled, catching cold — but ab- 
sorbed in the pursuit of an object? Have you 
not gloomily regretted that you were born with- 
out a mechanical turn, because there is really 
something about a machine . . . ? 

It has never struck you that you do possess a 
machine! Oh, blind! Oh, dull! It has never 
struck you that you have at hand a machine won- 
derful beyond all mechanisms in sheds, intricate, 
delicately adjustable, of astounding and miracu- 
lous possibilities, interminably interesting ! That 



THE HUMAN MACHINE n 

machine is yourself. " This fellow is preaching. 
I won't have it ! " you exclaim resentfully. Dear 
sir, I am not preaching, and, even if I were, I 
think you would have it. I think I can anyhow 
keep hold of your button for a while, though you 
pull hard. I am not preaching. I am simply bent 
on calling your attention to a fact which has 
perhaps wholly or partially escaped you — 
namely, that you are the most fascinating bit of 
machinery that ever was. You do yourself less 
than justice. It is said that men are only inter- 
ested in themselves. The truth is that, as a rule, 
men are interested in every mortal thing except 
themselves. They have a habit of taking them- 
selves for granted, and that habit is responsible 
for nine-tenths of the boredom and despair on 
the face of the planet. 

A man will wake up in the middle of the night 
(usually owing to some form of delightful ex- 
cess), and his brain will be very active indeed 
for a space ere he can go to sleep again. In that 
candid hour, after the.; exaltation of the evening 
and before the hope of the dawn, he will see 
everything in its true colours — except himself. 
There is nothing like a sleepless couch for a clear 
vision of one's environment. He will see all his 



12 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

wife's faults and the hopelessness of trying to 
cure them. He will momentarily see, though 
with less sharpness of outline, his own faults. 
He will probably decide that the anxieties of 
children outweigh the joys connected with chil- 
dren. He will admit all the shortcomings of 
existence, will face them like a man, grimly, 
sourly, in a sturdy despair. He will mutter: "Of 
course I'm angry! Who wouldn't be? Of 
course I 'm disappointed ! Did I expect this 
twenty years ago? Yes, we ought to save more. 
But we don't, so there you are ! I 'm bound to 
worry! I know I should be better if I didn't 
smoke so much. I know there 's absolutely no 
sense at all in taking liqueurs. Absurd to be 
ruffled with her when she 's in one of her moods. 
I don't have enough exercise. Can't be regular, 
somehow. Not the slightest use hoping that 
things will be different, because I know they 
won't. Queer world! Never really what you 
may call happy, you know. Now, if things were 
different . . ." He loses consciousness. 

Observe: he has taken himself for granted, 
just glancing at his faults and looking away again. 
It is his environment that has occupied his atten- 
tion, and his environment — " things " — that he 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 13 

would wish to have " diff erent," did he not know, 
out of the fulness of experience, that it is futile 
to desire such a change ? What he wants is a 
pipe that won't put itself into his mouth, a glass 
that won't leap of its own accord to his lips, 
money that won't slip untouched out of his 
pocket, legs that without asking will carry him 
certain miles every day in the open air, habits 
that practise themselves, a wife that will expand 
and contract according to his humours, like a 
Wernicke bookcase, always complete but never 
finished. Wise man, he perceives at once that 
he can't have these things. And so he resigns 
himself to the universe, and settles down to a 
permanent, restrained discontent. No one shall 
say he is unreasonable. 

You see, he has given no attention to the ma- 
chine. Let us not call it a flying-machine. Let 
us call it simply an automobile. There it is on 
the road, jolting, screeching, ratttling, perfum- 
ing. And there he is, saying : " This road ought 
to be as smooth as velvet. That hill in front is 
ridiculous, and the descent on the other side 
positively dangerous. And it's all turns — I 
can't see a hundred yards in front." He has a 
wild idea of trying to force the County Council 



i 4 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

to sand-paper the road, or of employing the new 
Territorial Army to remove the hill. But he dis- 
misses that idea — he is so reasonable. He ac- 
cepts all. He sits clothed in reasonableness on 
the machine, and accepts all. " Ass ! " you ex- 
claim. " Why does n't he get down and inflate 
that tyre, for one thing? Anyone can see the 
sparkling apparatus is wrong, and it 's perfectly 
certain the gear-box wants oil. Why does n't 

he ? " I will tell you why he does n't. Just 

because he is n't aware that he is on a machine 
at all. He has never examined what he is on. 
And at the back of his consciousness is a dim idea 
that he is perched on a piece of solid, immutable 
rock that runs on castors. 



II 

AMATEURS IN THE ART OF 
LIVING 

CONSIDERING that we have to spend 
the whole of our lives in this human 
machine, considering that it is our sole 
means of contact and compromise with the rest 
of the world, we really do devote to it very little 
attention. When I say " we," I mean our inmost 
spirits, the instinctive part, the mystery within 
that exists. And when I say " the human ma- 
chine " I mean the brain and the body — and 
chiefly the brain. The expression of the soul by 
means of the brain and body is what we call the 
art of " living." We certainly do not learn this 
art at school to any appreciable extent. At school 
we are taught that it is necessary to fling our 
arms and legs to and fro for so many hours per 
diem. We are also shown, practically, that our 
brains are capable of performing certain useful 
tricks, and that if we do not compel our brains 



16 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

to perform those tricks we shall suffer. Thus 
one day we run home and proclaim to our de- 
lighted parents that eleven twelves are 132. A 
feat of the brain! So it goes on until our parents 
begin to look up to us because we can chatter 
of cosines or sketch the foreign policy of Louis 
XIV. Good! But not a word about the prin- 
ciples of the art of living yet! Only a few de- 
tached rules from our parents, to be blindly fol- 
lowed when particular crises supervene. And, 
indeed, it would be absurd to talk to a school- 
boy about the expression of his soul. He would 
probably mutter a monosyllable which is not 
mice. 

Of course, school is merely a preparation for 
living; unless one goes to a university, in which 
case it is a preparation for university. One is 
supposed to turn one's attention to living when 
these preliminaries are over — say at the age of 
about twenty. Assuredly one lives then; there 
is, however, nothing new in that, for one has 
been living all the time, in a fashion; all the 
time one has been using the machine without 
understanding it. But does one, school and col- 
lege being over, enter upon a study of the ma- 
chine? Not a bit. The question then becomes, 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 17 

not how to live, but how to obtain and retain a 
position in which one will be able to live; how 
to get minute portions of dead animals and plants 
which one can swallow, in order not to die of 
hunger; how to acquire and constantly renew a 
stock of other portions of dead animals and plants 
in which one can envelop oneself in order not to 
die of cold; how to procure the exclusive right 
of entry into certain huts where one may sleep 
and eat without being rained upon by the clouds 
of heaven. And so forth. And when one has 
realised this ambition, there comes the desire to 
be able to double the operation and do it, not for 
oneself alone, but for oneself and another. Mar- 
riage! But no scientific sustained attention is 
yet given to the real business of living, of smooth 
intercourse, of self-expression, of conscious adap- 
tation to environment — in brief, to the study 
of the machine. At thirty the chances are that 
a man will understand better the draught of a 
chimney than his own respiratory apparatus — 
to name one of the simple, obvious things — and 
as for understanding the working of his own 
brain — what an idea! As for the skill to avoid 
the waste of power involved by friction in the 
business of living, do we give an hour to it in 



18 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

a month? Do we ever at all examine it save in 
an amateurish and clumsy fashion? A young 
lady produces a water-colour drawing. " Very 
nice ! " we say, and add, to ourselves, " For an 
amateur." But our living is more amateurish 
than that young lady's drawing; though surely 
we ought everyone of us to be professionals at 
living ! 

When we have been engaged in the prelimi- 
naries to living for about fifty-five years, we 
begin to think about slacking off. Up till this 
period our reason for not having scientifically 
studied the art of living — the perfecting and use 
of the finer parts of the machine — is not that 
we have lacked leisure (most of us have enor- 
mous heaps of leisure), but that we have simply 
been too absorbed in the preliminaries, have, in 
fact, treated the preliminaries to the business as 
the business itself. Then at fifty-five we ought 
at last to begin to live our lives with professional 
skill, as a professional painter paints pictures. 
Yes, but we can't. It is too late then. Neither 
painters, nor acrobats, nor any professionals can 
be formed at the age of fifty-five. Thus we finish 
our lives amateurishly, as we have begun them. 
And when the machine creaks and sets our teeth 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 19 

on edge, or refuses to obey the steering-wheel 
and deposits us in the ditch, we say : " Can't be 
helped! " or " Does n't matter! It will be all the 
same a hundred years hence ! " or : "I must make 
the best of things." And we try to believe that 
in accepting the status quo we have justified 
the status quo, and all the time we feel our 
insincerity. 

You exclaim that I exaggerate. I do. To 
force into prominence an aspect of affairs usually 
overlooked, it is absolutely necessary to exag- 
gerate. Poetic license is one name for this kind 
of exaggeration. But I exaggerate very little 
indeed, much less than perhaps you think. I 
know that you are going to point out to me that 
vast numbers of people regularly spend a con- 
siderable portion of their leisure in striving after 
self-improvement. Granted! And I am glad of 
it. But I should be gladder if their strivings 
bore more closely upon the daily business of 
living, of self-expression without friction and 
without futile desires. See this man who regu- 
larly studies every evening of his life! He has 
genuinely understood the nature of poetry, and 
his taste is admirable. He recites verse with 
true feeling, and may be said to be highly culti- 



20 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

vated. Poetry is a continual source of pleasure 
to him. True! But why is he always complain- 
ing about not receiving his deserts in the office? 
Why is he worried about finance? Why does he 
so often sulk with his wife? Why does he per- 
sist in eating more than his digestion will toler- 
ate? It was not written in the book of fate that 
he should complain and worry and sulk and 
suffer. And if he was a professional at living he 
would not do these things. There is no reason 
why he should do them, except the reason that 
he has never learnt his business, never studied 
the human machine as a whole, never really 
thought rationally about living. Supposing you 
encountered an automobilist who was swerving 
and grinding all over the road, and you stopped 
to ask what was the matter, and he replied: 
" Never mind what 's the matter. Just look at 
my lovely acetylene lamps, how they shine, and 
how I Ve polished them ! " You would not re- 
gard him as a Clifford-Earp, or even as an en- 
tirely sane man. So with our student of poetry. 
It is indubitable that a large amount of what is 
known as self-improvement is simply self-indul- 
gence — a form of pleasure which only inciden- 
tally improves a particular part of the machine, 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 21 

and even that to the neglect of far more impor- 
tant parts. 

My aim is to direct a man's attention to himself 
as a whole, considered as a machine, complex 
and capable of quite extraordinary efficiency, for 
travelling through this world smoothly, in any 
desired manner, with satisfaction not only to 
himself but to the people he meets en route, and 
the people who are overtaking him and whom 
he is overtaking. My aim is to show that only 
an inappreciable fraction of our ordered and sus- 
tained efforts is given to the business of actual 
living, as distinguished from the preliminaries 
to living. 



Ill 

THE BRAIN AS A GENTLE- 
MAN-AT-LARGE 

IT is not as if, in this business of daily living, 
we were seriously hampered by ignorance 
either as to the results which we ought to 
obtain, or as to the general means which we must 
employ in order to obtain them. With all our 
absorption in the mere preliminaries to living, 
and all our carelessness about living itself, we 
arrive pretty soon at a fairly accurate notion of 
what satisfactory living is, and we perceive with 
some clearness the methods necessary to success. 
I have pictured the man who wakes up in the 
middle of the night and sees the horrid semi- 
fiasco of his life. But let me picture the man 
who wakes up refreshed early on a fine summer 
morning and looks into his mind with the eyes 
of hope and experience, not experience and de- 
spair. That man will pass a delightful half-hour 
in thinking upon the scheme of the universe as 
it affects himself. He is quite clear that content- 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 23 

ment depends on his own acts, and that no power 
can prevent him from performing those acts. 
He plans everything out, and before he gets up 
he knows precisely what he must and will do in 
certain foreseen crises and junctures. He sin- 
cerely desires to live efficiently — who would 
wish to make a daily mess of existence? — and 
he knows the way to realise the desire. 

And yet, mark me! That man will not have 
been an hour on his feet on this difficult earth 
before the machine has unmistakably gone 
wrong: the machine which was designed to do 
this work of living, which is capable of doing it 
thoroughly well, but which has not been put into 
order! What is the use of consulting the map 
of life and tracing the itinerary, and getting the 
machine out of the shed, and making a start, if 
half the nuts are loose, or the steering pillar is 
twisted, or there is no petrol in the tank? (Hav- 
ing asked this question, I will drop the me- 
chanico-vehicular comparison, which is too rough 
and crude for the delicacy of the subject.) 
Where has the human machine gone wrong? 
It has gone wrong in the brain. What, is he 
" wrong in the head " ? Most assuredly, most 
strictly. He knows — none better — that when 



24 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

his wife employs a particular tone containing 
ten grains of asperity, and he replies in a par- 
ticular tone containing eleven grains, the conse- 
quences will be explosive. He knows, on the 
other hand, that if he replies in a tone contain- 
ing only one little drop of honey the consequences 
may not be unworthy of two reasonable beings. 
He knows this. His brain is fully instructed. 
And lo! his brain, while arguing that women 
are really too absurd (as if that was the point), 
is sending down orders to the muscles of the 
throat and mouth which result in at least eleven 
grains of asperity, and conjugal relations are 
endangered for the day. He didn't want to do 
it. His desire was not to do it. He despises 
himself for doing it. But his brain was not in 
working order. His brain ran away — "raced" 
— on its own account, against reason, against 
desire, against morning resolves — and there 
he is! 

That is just one example, of the simplest and 
slightest. Examples can be multiplied. The man 
may be a young man whose immediate future 
depends on his passing an examination — an 
examination which he is capable of passing " on 
his head," which nothing can prevent him from 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 25 

passing if only his brain will not be so absurd 
as to give orders to his legs to walk out of the 
house towards the tennis court instead of send- 
ing them upstairs to the study; if only, having 
once safely lodged him in the study, his brain 
will devote itself to the pages of books instead 
of dwelling on the image of a nice girl — not 
at all like other girls. Or the man may be an old 
man who will live in perfect comfort if only his 
brain will not interminably run round and round 
in a circle of grievances, apprehensions, and fears 
which no amount of contemplation can destroy 
or even ameliorate. 

The brain, the brain — that is the seat of 
trouble ! " Well," you say, " of course it is. We 
all know that ! " We don't act as if we did, any- 
way. " Give us more brains, Lord ! " ejaculated 
a great writer. Personally, I think he would 
have been wiser if he had asked first for the 
power to keep in order such brains as we have. 
We indubitably possess quite enough brains, 
quite as much as we can handle. The supreme 
muddlers of living are often people of quite 
remarkable intellectual faculty, with a quite 
remarkable gift of being wise for others. The 
pity is that our brains have a way of " wander- 



26 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

ing," as it is politely called. Brain-wandering is 
indeed now recognised as a specific disease. I 
wonder what you, O business man with an office 
in Ludgate Circus, would say to your office-boy, 
whom you had dispatched on an urgent message 
to Westminster, and whom you found larking 
around Euston Station when you rushed to catch 
your week-end train. " Please, sir, I started to 
go to Westminster, but there 's something funny 
in my limbs that makes me go up all manner of 
streets. I can't help it, sir! " " Can't you? " you 
would say. " Well, you had better go and be 
somebody else's office-boy." Your brain is 
something worse than that office-boy, something 
more insidiously potent for evil. 

I conceive the brain of the average well- 
intentioned man as possessing the tricks and 
manners of one of those gentlemen-at-large who, 
having nothing very urgent to do, stroll along 
and offer their services gratis to some short- 
handed work of philanthropy. They will com- 
monly demoralise and disorganise the business 
conduct of an affair in about a fortnight. They 
come when they like; they go when they like. 
Sometimes they are exceedingly industrious and 
obedient, but then there is an even chance that 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 27 

they will shirk and follow their own sweet will. 
And they must n't be spoken to, or pulled up — 
for have they not kindly volunteered, and are 
they not giving their days for naught? These 
persons are the bane of the enterprises in which 
they condescend to meddle. Now, there is a vast 
deal too much of the gentleman-at-large about 
one's brain. One's brain has no right whatever 
to behave as a gentleman-at-large; but it in fact 
does. It forgets ; it flatly ignores orders ; at the 
critical moment, when pressure is highest, it 
simply lights a cigarette and goes out for a walk. 
And we meekly sit down under this behaviour! 
" I did n't feel like stewing," says the young man 
who, against his wish, will fail in his examina- 
tion. " The words were out of my mouth before 
I knew it," says the husband whose wife is a 
woman. " I could n't get any inspiration to-day," 
says the artist. " I can't resist Stilton," says the 
fellow who is dying of greed. " One can't help 
one's thoughts," says the old worrier. And this 
last really voices the secret excuse of all five. 

And you all say to me : " My brain is myself. 
How can I alter myself? I was born like that." 
In the first place you were not born " like that," 
you have lapsed to that. And in the second 



28 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

place your brain is not yourself. It is only a 
part of yourself, and not the highest seat of 
authority. Do you love your mother, wife, or 
children with your brain? Do you desire with 
your brain? Do you, in a word, ultimately and 
essentially ti<ve with your brain? No. Your 
brain is an instrument. The proof that it is an 
instrument lies in the fact that, when 'extreme 
necessity urges, you can command your brain to 
do certain things, and it does them. The first 
of the two great principles which underlie the 
efficiency of the human machine is this: The 
brain is a servant, exterior to the central force of 
the Ego. If it is out of control the reason is not 
that it is uncontrollable, but merely that its dis- 
cipline has been neglected. The brain can be 
trained, as the hand and eye can be trained; it 
can be made as obedient as a sporting dog, and 
by similar methods. In the meantime the indis- 
pensable preparation for brain-discipline is to 
form the habit of regarding one's brain as an 
instrument exterior to one's self, like a tongue 
or a foot. 



IV 
THE FIRST PRACTICAL STEP 

THE brain is a highly quaint organism. 
Let me say at once, lest I should be 
cannonaded by physiologists, psycholo- 
gists, or metaphysicians, by that the " brain " 
I mean the faculty which reasons and which 
gives orders to the muscles. I mean exactly 
what the plain man means by the brain. The 
brain is the diplomatist which arranges relations 
between our instinctive self and the universe, 
and it fulfils its mission when it provides for the 
maximum of freedom to the instincts with the 
minimum of friction. It argues with the in- 
stincts. It takes them on one side and points 
out the unwisdom of certain performances. It 
catches them by the coat-tails when they are 
about to make fools of themselves. " Don't drink 
all that iced champagne at a draught," it says 
to one instinct ; " we may die of it." " Don't 
catch that rude fellow one in the eye," it says 
to another instinct; "he is more powerful than 



3 o THE HUMAN MACHINE 

us." It is, in fact, a majestic spectacle of com- 
mon sense. And yet it has the most extraordi- 
nary lapses. It is just like that man — we all 
know him and consult him — who is a continual 
fount of excellent, sagacious advice on every- 
thing, but who somehow cannot bring his sagac- 
ity to bear on his own personal career. 

In the matter of its own special activities the 
brain is usually undisciplined and unreliable. 
We never know what it will do next. We give it 
some work to do, say, as we are walking along 
the street to the office. Perhaps it has to devise 
some scheme for making £150 suffice for £200, 
or perhaps it has to plan out the heads of a very 
important letter. We meet a pretty woman, and 
away that undisciplined, sagacious brain runs 
after her, dropping the scheme or the draft 
letter, and amusing itself with aspirations or 
regrets for half an hour, an hour, sometimes a 
day. The serious part of our instinctive self 
feebly remonstrates, but without effect. Or it 
may be that we have suffered a great disap- 
pointment, which is definite and hopeless. Will 
the brain, like a sensible creature, leave that dis- 
appointment alone, and instead of living in the 
past live in the present or the future? Not it! 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 31 

Though it knows perfectly well that it is wasting 
its time and casting a very painful and utterly 
unnecessary gloom over itself and us, it can so 
little control its unhealthy, morbid appetite that 
no expostulations will induce it to behave ration- 
ally. Or perhaps, after a confabulation with the 
soul, it has been decided that when next a certain 
harmful instinct comes into play the brain shall 
firmly interfere. " Yes," says the brain, " I really 
will watch that." But when the moment arrives, 
is the brain on the spot? The brain has prob- 
ably forgotten the affair entirely, or remembered 
it too late; or sighs, as the victorious instinct 
knocks it on the head : " Well, next time ! " 

All this, and much more that every reader can 
supply from his own exciting souvenirs, is absurd 
and ridiculous on the part of the brain. It is 
a conclusive proof that the brain is out of con- 
dition, idle as a nigger, capricious as an actor- 
manager, and eaten to the core with loose habits. 
Therefore the brain must be put into training. 
It is the most important part of the human 
machine by which the soul expresses and de- 
velops itself, and it must learn good habits. And 
primarily it must be taught obedience. Obedi- 
ence can only be taught by imposing one's will, 



32 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

by the sheer force of volition. And the brain 
must be mastered by will-power. The begin- 
ning of wise living lies in the control of the brain 
by the will; so that the brain may act according 
to the precepts which the brain itself gives. 
With an obedient disciplined brain a man may 
live always right up to the standard of his best 
moments. 

To teach a child obedience you tell it to do 
something, and you see that that something is 
done. The same with the brain. Here is the 
foundation of an efficient life and the antidote 
for the tendency to make a fool of oneself. It 
is marvellously simple. Say to your brain: 
" From 9 o'clock to 9.30 this morning you must 
dwell without ceasing on a particular topic which 
I will give you." Now, it does n't matter what 
this topic is — the point is to control and invig- 
orate the brain by exercise — but you may just 
as well give it a useful topic to think over as a 
futile one. You might give it this : " My brain 
is my servant. I am not the plaything of my 
brain." Let it concentrate on these statements 
for thirty minutes. " What? " you cry. " Is this 
the way to an efficient life? Why, there 's noth- 
ing in it ! " Simple as it may appear, this is the 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 33 

way, and it is the only way. As for there being 
nothing in it, try it. I guarantee that you will 
fail to keep your brain concentrated on the given 
idea for thirty seconds — let alone thirty min- 
utes. You will find your brain conducting itself 
in a manner which would be comic were it not 
tragic. Your first experiments will result in dis- 
heartening failure, for to exact from the brain, at 
will and by will, concentration on a given idea 
for even so short a period as half an hour is an 
exceedingly difficult feat — and a fatiguing! It 
needs perseverance. It needs a terrible obsti- 
nacy on the part of the will. That brain of yours 
will be hopping about all over the place, and 
every time it hops you must bring it back by 
force to its original position. You must abso- 
lutely compel it to ignore every idea except the 
one which you have selected for its attention. 
You cannot hope to triumph all at once. But 
you can hope to triumph. There is no royal road 
to the control of the brain. There is no patent 
dodge about it, and no complicated function 
which a plain person may not comprehend. It 
is simply a question of : "I will, J will, and I 
wilt" (Italics here are indispensable.) 

Let me resume. Efficient living, living up to 



34 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

one's best standard, getting the last ounce of 
power out of the machine with the minimum of 
friction: these things depend on the disciplined 
and vigorous condition of the brain. The brain 
can be disciplined by learning the habit of obedi- 
ence. And it can learn the habit of obedience 
by the practice of concentration. Disciplinary 
concentration, though nothing could have the air 
of being simpler, is the basis of the whole struc- 
ture. This fact must be grasped imaginatively; 
it must be seen and felt. The more regularly 
concentration is practised, the more firmly will 
the imagination grasp the effects of it, both 
direct and indirect. After but a few days of 
honest trying in the exercise which I have indi- 
cated, you will perceive its influence. You will 
grow accustomed to the idea, at first strange in 
its novelty, of the brain being external to the 
supreme force which is you, and in subjection 
to that force. You will, as a not very distant 
possibility, see yourself in possession of the 
power to switch your brain on and off in a par- 
ticular subject as you switch electricity on and 
off in a particular room. The brain will get used 
to the straight paths of obedience. And — a re- 
piarkable phenomenon — it will, by the mere 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 35 

practice of obedience, become less forgetful and 
more effective. It will not so frequently give 
way to an instinct that takes it by surprise. In 
a word, it will have received a general tonic. 
With a brain that is improving every day you 
can set about the perfecting of the machine in 
a scientific manner. 



HABIT-FORMING BY CONCEN- 
TRATION 

Jk S soon as the will has got the upper hand 
EJL of the brain — as soon as it can say to 
■t JL the brain, with a fair certainty of being 
obeyed: " Do this. Think along these lines, and 
continue to do so without wandering until I give 
you leave to stop " — then is the time arrived 
when the perfecting of the human machine may 
be undertaken in a large and comprehensive 
spirit, as a city council undertakes the purifica- 
tion and reconstruction of a city. The tremen- 
dous possibilities of an obedient brain will be 
perceived immediately we begin to reflect upon 
what we mean by our " character." Now, a 
person's character is, and can be, nothing else 
but the total result of his habits of thought. A 
person is benevolent because he habitually thinks 
benevolently. A person is idle because his 
thoughts dwell habitually on the instant pleas- 
ures of idleness. It is true that everybody is 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 37 

born with certain predispositions, and that these 
predispositions influence very strongly the early 
formation of habits of thought. But the fact 
remains that the character is built by long-con- 
tinued habits of thought. If the mature edifice 
of character usually shows in an exaggerated 
form the peculiarities of the original predispo- 
sition, this merely indicates a probability that 
the slow erection of the edifice has proceeded at 
haphazard, and that reason has not presided 
over it. A child may be born with a tendency to 
bent shoulders. If nothing is done, if on the 
contrary he becomes a clerk and abhors gym- 
nastics, his shoulders will develop an excessive 
roundness, entirely through habit. Whereas, if 
his will, guided by his reason, had compelled the 
formation of a corrective physical habit, his 
shoulders might have been, if not quite straight, 
nearly so. Thus a physical habit! The same 
with a mental habit. 

The more closely we examine the develop- 
ment of original predispositions, the more clearly 
we shall see that this development is not inev- 
itable, is not a process which works itself out 
independently according to mysterious, ruthless 
laws which we cannot understand. For instance, 



38 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

the effect of an original predisposition may be 
destroyed by an accidental shock. A young man 
with an inherited tendency to alcohol may de- 
velop into a stern teetotaller through the shock 
caused by seeing his drunken father strike his 
mother; whereas, if his father had chanced to 
be affectionate in drink, the son might have 
ended in the gutter. No ruthless law here! It 
is notorious, also, that natures are sometimes 
completely changed in their development by 
chance momentary contact with natures stronger 
than themselves. " From that day I resolved 

" etc. You know the phrase. Often the 

resolve is not kept ; but often it is kept. A spark 
has inflamed the will. The burning will has 
tyrannised over the brain. New habits have 
been formed. And the result looks just like 
a miracle. 

Now, if these great transformations can be 
brought about by accident, cannot similar trans- 
formations be brought about by a reasonable 
design? At any rate, if one starts to bring them 
about, one starts with the assurance that trans- 
formations are not impossible, since they have 
occurred. One starts also in the full knowledge 
of the influence of habit on life. Take any one 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 39 

of your own habits, mental or physical. You 
will be able to recall the time when that habit 
did not exist, or if it did exist it was scarcely 
perceptible. And you will discover that nearly 
all your habits have been formed unconsciously, 
by daily repetitions which bore no relation to 
a general plan, and which you practised not 
noticing. You will be compelled to admit that 
your " character," as it is to-day, is a structure 
that has been built almost without the aid of an 
architect; higgledy-piggledy, anyhow. But oc- 
casionally the architect did step in and design 
something. Here and there among your habits 
you will find one that you consciously and of 
deliberate purpose initiated and persevered with 
— doubtless owing to some happy influence. 
What is the difference between that conscious 
habit and the unconscious habits? None what- 
ever as regards its effect on the sum of your 
character. It may be the strongest of all your 
habits. The only quality that differentiates it 
from the others is that it has a definite object 
(most likely a good object), and that it wholly 
or partially fulfils that object. There is not a 
man who reads these lines but has, in this detail 
or that, proved in himself that the will, forcing 



4 o THE HUMAN MACHINE 

the brain to repeat the same action again 
and again, can modify the shape of his char- 
acter as a sculptor modifies the shape of 
damp clay. 

But if a grown man's character is developing 
from day to day (as it is), if nine-tenths of the 
development is due to unconscious action and 
one-tenth to conscious action, and if the one- 
tenth conscious is the most satisfactory part 
of the total result; why, in the name of common 
sense, henceforward, should not nine-tenths, in- 
stead of one-tenth, be due to conscious action? 
What is there to prevent this agreeable consum- 
mation? There is nothing whatever to prevent 
it — except insubordination on the part of the 
brain. And insubordination of the brain can be 
cured, as I have previously shown. When I see 
men unhappy and inefficient in the craft of Ivv- 
tnffy from sheer, crass inattention to their own 
development; when I see misshapen men build- 
ing up businesses and empires, and never stop- 
ping to build up themselves; when I see dreary 
men expending precisely the same energy on 
teaching a dog to walk on its hind-legs as would 
brighten the whole colour of their own lives, I 
feel as if I wanted to give up the ghost, so ridic- 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 41 

ulous, so fatuous does the spectacle seem! But, 
of course, I do not give up the ghost. The par- 
oxysm passes. Only I really must cry out: 
" Can't you see what you 're missing? Can't you 
see that you 're missing the most interesting 
thing on earth, far more interesting than busi- 
nesses, empires, and dogs? Does n't it strike you 
how clumsy and short-sighted you are — work- 
ing always with an inferior machine when 
you might have a smooth-gliding perfection? 
Does n't it strike you how badly you are treating 
yourself? " 

Listen, you confirmed grumbler, you who make 
the evening meal hideous with complaints against 
destiny — for it is you I will single out. Are 
you aware what people are saying about you 
behind your back? They are saying that you 
render yourself and your family miserable by 
the habit which has grown on you of always 
grumbling. "Surely it isn't as bad as that?" 
you protest. Yes, it is just as bad as that. You 
say : " The fact is, I know it 's absurd to grumble. 
But I 'm like that. I 've tried to stop it, and I 
can't! " How have you tried to stop it? " Well, 
I 've made up my mind several times to fight 
against it, but I never succeed. This is strictly 



42 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

between ourselves. I don't usually admit that 
I 'm a grumbler." Considering that you grumble 
for about an* hour and a half every day of your 
life, it was sanguine, my dear sir, to expect to 
cure such a habit by means of a solitary inten- 
tion, formed at intervals in the brain and then 
forgotten. No ! # You must do more than that* 
If you will daily fix your brain firmly for half 
an hour on the truth (you know it to be a truth) 
that grumbling is absurd and futile, your brain 
will henceforward begin to form a habit in that 
direction; it will begin to be moulded to the 
idea that grumbling is absurd and futile. In odd 
moments, when it is n't thinking of anything in 
particular, it will suddenly remember that grum- 
bling is absurd and futile. When you sit down 
to the meal and open your mouth to say : " I 
can't think what my ass of a partner means 

by " it will remember that grumbling is 

absurd and futile, and will alter the arrange- 
ment of your throat, teeth, and tongue, so that 
you will say : " What fine weather we 're hav- 
ing ! " In brief, it will remember involuntarily, 
by a new habit. All who look into- their experi- 
ence will admit that the failure to replace old 
habits by new ones is due to the fact that at the 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 43 

critical moment the brain does not remember; it 
simply forgets. The practice of concentration 
will cure that. All depends on regular concen- 
tration. This grumbling is an instance, though 
chosen not quite at hazard. 



VI 
LORD OVER THE NODDLE 

HAVING proved by personal experiment 
the truth of the first of the two great 
principles which concern the human 
machine — namely, that the brain is a servant, 
not a master, and can be controlled — we may now 
come to the second. The second is more funda- 
mental than the first, but it can be of no use 
until the first is understood and put into practice. 
The human machine is an apparatus of brain 
and muscle for enabling the Ego to develop freely 
in the universe by which it is surrounded, with- 
out friction. Its function is to convert the facts 
of the universe to the best advantage of the 
Ego. The facts of the universe are the material 
with which it is its business to deal — not the 
facts of an ideal universe, but the facts of this 
universe. Hence, when friction occurs, when 
the facts of the universe cease to be of advantage 
to the Ego, the fault is in the machine. It is not 
the solar system that has gone wrong, but the 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 45 

human machine. Second great principle, there- 
fore: "In case of friction, the machine is always 
at fault" 

You can control nothing but your own mind. 
Even your two-year-old babe may defy you by 
the instinctive force of its personality. But your 
own mind you can control. Your own mind is 
a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful 
can enter except by your permission. Your own 
mind has the power to transmute every external 
phenomenon to its own purposes. If happiness 
arises from cheerfulness, kindliness, and recti- 
tude (and who will deny it?), what possible com- 
bination of circumstances is going to make you 
unhappy so long as the machine remains in 
order? If self -development consists in the utili- 
sation of one's environment (not utilisation of 
somebody else's environment), how can your 
environment prevent you from developing? You 
would look rather foolish without it, anyway. 
In that noddle of yours is everything necessary 
for development, for the maintaining of dignity, 
for the achieving of happiness, and you are abso- 
lute lord over the noddle, will you but exercise 
the powers of lordship. Why worry about the 
contents of somebody else's noddle, in which 



46 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

you can be nothing but an intruder, when you 
may arrive at a better result, with absolute cer- 
tainty, by confining your activities to your own? 
" Look within." " The Kingdom of Heaven 
is within you." " Oh, yes ! " you protest. " All 
that 's old. Epictetus said that. Marcus Aure- 
lius said that. Christ said that." They did. I ad- 
mit it readily. But if you were ruffled this morn- 
ing because your motor-omnibus broke down, 
and you had to take a cab, then so far as you are 
concerned these great teachers lived in vain. 
You, calling yourself a reasonable man, are 
going about dependent for your happiness, dig- 
nity, and growth, upon a thousand things over 
which you have no control, and the most exqui- 
sitely organised machine for ensuring happiness, 
dignity, and growth, is rusting away inside you. 
And all because you have a sort of notion that 
a saying said two thousand years ago cannot be 
practical. 

You remark sagely to your child : " No, my 
child, you cannot have that moon, and you will 
accomplish nothing by crying for it. Now, here 
is this beautiful box of bricks, by means of which 
you may amuse yourself while learning many 
wonderful matters and improving your mind. 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 47 

You must try to be content with what you have, 
and to make the best of it. If you had the moon 
you would n't be any happier." Then you lie 
awake half the night repining because the last 
post has brought a letter to the effect that " the 
Board cannot entertain your application for," 
etc. You say the two cases are not alike. They 
are not. Your child has never heard of Epicte- 
tus. On the other hand, justice is the moon. 
At your age you surely know that. " But the 
Directors ought to have granted my application," 
you insist. Exactly! I agree. But we are not 
in a universe of oughts. You have a special 
apparatus within you for dealing with a universe 
where oughts are flagrantly disregarded. And 
you are not using it. You are lying awake, keep- 
ing your wife awake, injuring your health, in- 
juring hers, losing your dignity and your cheer- 
fulness. Why? Because you think that these 
antics and performances will influence the Board? 
Because you think that they will put you into a 
better condition for dealing with your environ- 
ment to-morrow? Not a bit. Simply because 
the machine is at fault. 

In certain cases we do make use of our ma- 
chines (as well as their sad condition of negleqt 



48 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

will allow), but in other cases we behave in an 
extraordinarily irrational manner. Thus if we 
sally out and get caught in a heavy shower we 
do not, unless very far gone in foolishness, sit 
down and curse the weather. We put up our 
umbrella, if we have one, and if not we hurry 
home. We may grumble, but it is not serious 
grumbling; we accept the shower as a fact of 
the universe, and control ourselves. Thus also, 
if by a sudden catastrophe we lose somebody 
who is important to us, we grieve, but we con- 
trol ourselves, recognising one of those hazards 
of destiny from which not even millionaires are 
exempt. And the result on our Ego is usually 
to improve it in essential respects. But there 
are other strokes of destiny, other facts of the 
universe, against which we protest as a child 
protests when deprived of the moon. 

Take the case of an individual with an imper- 
fect idea of honesty. Now, that individual is 
the consequence of his father and mother and 
his environment, and his father and mother of 
theirs, and so backwards to the single-celled 
protoplasm. That individual is a result of the 
cosmic order, the inevitable product of cause and 
effect. We know that. We must admit that he 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 49 

is just as much a fact of the universe as a shower 
of rain or a storm at sea that swallows a ship. 
We freely grant in the abstract that there must 
be, at the present stage of evolution, a certain 
number of persons with unfair minds. We are 
quite ready to contemplate such an individual 
with philosophy — until it happens that, in the 
course of the progress of the solar system, he 
runs up against ourselves. Then listen to the 
outcry! Listen to the continual explosions of a 
righteous man aggrieved! The individual may 
be our clerk, cashier, son, father, brother, part- 
ner, wife, employer. We are ill-used! We are 
being treated unfairly! We kick; we scream. 
We nourish the inward sense of grievance that 
eats the core out of content. We sit down in 
the rain. We decline to think of umbrellas, or 
to run to shelter. 

We care not that that individual is a fact which 
the universe has been slowly manufacturing for 
millions of years. Our attitude implies that we 
want eternity to roll back and begin again, in 
such wise that we at any rate shall not be dis- 
turbed. Though we have a machine for the trans- 
mutation of facts into food for our growth, we 
do not dream of using it. But, we say, he is 



50 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

doing us harm ! Where? In our minds. He has 
robbed us of our peace, our comfort, our happi- 
ness, our good temper. Even if he has, we might 
just as well inveigh against a shower. But has 
he? What was our brain doing while this 
naughty person stepped in and robbed us of the 
only possessions worth having? No, no! It is 
not that he has done us harm — the one cheerful 
item in a universe of stony facts is that no one 
can harm anybody except himself — it is merely 
that we have been silly, precisely as silly as if 
we had taken a seat in the rain with a folded 
umbrella by our side. . . . The machine is at 
fault. I fancy we are now obtaining glimpses 
of what that phrase really means. 



VII 
WHAT "LIVING" CHIEFLY IS 

IT is in intercourse — social, sentimental, or 
business — with one's fellows that the 
qualities and the condition of the human 
machine are put to the test and strained. That 
part of my life which I conduct by myself, with- 
out reference — or at any rate without direct 
reference — to others, I can usually manage in 
such a way that the gods do not positively weep 
at the spectacle thereof. My environment is 
simpler, less puzzling, when I am alone, my 
calm and my self-control less liable to violent 
fluctuations. Impossible to be disturbed by a 
chair! Impossible that a chair should get on 
one's nerves! Impossible to blame a chair for 
not being as reasonable, as archangelic as I am 
myself! But when it comes to people! . . . 
Well, that is "living," then! The art of life, 
the art of extracting all its power from the human 
machine, does not lie chiefly in processes of 



52 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

bookish-culture, nor in contemplations of the 
beauty and majesty of existence. It lies chiefly 
in keeping the peace, the whole peace, and noth- 
ing but the peace, with those with whom one is 
" thrown." Is it in sitting ecstatic over Shelley, 
Shakespeare, or Herbert Spencer, solitary in my 
room of a night, that I am " improving myself " 
and learning to live? Or is it in watching over 
all my daily human contacts? Do not seek to 
escape the comparison by insinuating that I 
despise study, or by pointing out that the eternal 
verities are beyond dailiness. Nothing of the 
kind ! I am so " silly " about books that merely 
to possess them gives me pleasure. And if the 
verities are good for eternity they ought to be 
good for a day. If I cannot exchange them for 
daily coin — if I can't buy happiness for a single 
day because I 've nothing less than an eternal 
verity about me and nobody has sufficient change 
— then my eternal verity is not an eternal verity. 
It is merely an unnegotiable bit of glass (called 
a diamond), or even a note on the Bank of 
Engraving. 

I can say to myself when I arise in the morn- 
ing : " I am master of my brain. No one can 
get in there and rage about like a bull in a china 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 53 

shop. If my companions on the planet's crust 
choose to rage about they cannot affect me J I 
will not let them. I have power to maintain my 
own calm, and I will. No earthly being can force 
me to be false to my principles, or to be blind 
to the beauty of the universe, or to be gloomy, 
or to be irritable, or to complain against my lot. 
For these things depend on the brain; cheer- 
fulness, kindliness, and honest thinking are all 
within the department of the brain. The dis- 
ciplined brain can accomplish them. And my 
brain is disciplined, and I will discipline it more 
and more as the days pass. I am, therefore, in- 
dependent of hazard, and I will back myself to 
conduct all intercourse as becomes a rational 
creature." ... I can say this. I can ram this 
argument by force of will into my brain, and by 
dint of repeating it often enough I shall assur- 
edly arrive at the supreme virtues of reason. I 
should assuredly conquer — the brain being such 
a machine of habit — even if I did not take the 
trouble to consider in the slightest degree what 
manner of things my fellow-men are — by acting 
merely in my own interests. But the way of 
perfection (I speak relatively) will be immensely 
shortened and smoothed if I do consider, dis- 



54 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

passionately, the case of the other human ma- 
chines. Thus : — 

The truth is that my attitude towards my fel- 
lows is fundamentally and totally wrong, and 
that it entails on my thinking machine a strain 
which is quite unnecessary, though I may have 
arranged the machine so as to withstand the 
strain successfully. The secret of smooth living 
is a calm cheerfulness which will leave me always 
in full possession of my reasoning faculty — in 
order that I may live by reason instead of by 
instinct and momentary passion. The secret of 
calm cheerfulness is kindliness; no person can 
be consistently cheerful and calm who does not 
consistently think kind thoughts. But how can 
I be kindly when I pass the major portion of 
my time in blaming the people who surround 
me — who are part of my environment? If I, 
blaming, achieve some approach to kindliness, it 
is only by a great and exhausting effort of self- 
mastery. The inmost secret, then, lies in not 
blaming, in not judging and emitting verdicts. 
Oh ! I do not blame by word of mouth ! I am far 
too advanced for such a puerility. I keep the 
blame in my own breast, where it festers. I am 
always privately forgiving, which is bad for me. 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 55 

Because, you know, there is nothing to forgive. 
I do not have to forgive bad weather; nor, if I 
found myself in an earthquake, should I have to 
forgive the earthquake. 

All blame, uttered or unexpressed, is wrong. I 
do not blame myself. I can explain myself to 
myself. I can invariably explain myself. If I 
forged a friend's name on a cheque I should ex- 
plain the affair quite satisfactorily to myself. 
And instead of blaming myself I should sympa- 
thise with myself for having been driven into 
such an excessively awkward corner. Let me 
examine honestly my mental processes, and I 
must admit that my attitude towards others is 
entirely different from my attitude towards my- 
self. I must admit that in the seclusion of my 
mind, though I say not a word, I am constantly 
blaming others because I am not happy. When- 
ever I bump up against an opposing personality 
and my smooth progress is impeded, I secretly 
blame the opposer. I act as though I had shouted 
to the world : " Clear out of the way, everyone, 
for / am coming ! " Everyone does not clear 
out of the way. I did not really expect everyone 
to clear out of the way. But I act, within, as 
though I had so expected. I blame. Hence 



56 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

kindliness, hence cheerfulness, is rendered vastly 
more difficult for me. 

What I ought to do is this ! I ought to reflect 
again and again, and yet again, that the beings 
among whom I have to steer, the living environ- 
ment out of which I have to manufacture my 
happiness, are just as inevitable in the scheme 
of evolution as I am myself; have just as much 
right to be themselves as I have to be myself; 
are precisely my equals in the face of Nature; 
are capable of being explained as I am capable 
of being explained ; are entitled to the same lati- 
tude as I am entitled to, and are no more respon- 
sible for their composition and their environment 
than I for mine. I ought to reflect again and 
again, and yet again, that they all deserve from 
me as much sympathy as I give to myself. Why 
not? Having thus reflected in a general manner, 
I ought to take one by one the individuals with 
whom I am brought into frequent contact, and 
seek, by a deliberate effort of the imagination 
and the reason, to understand them, to under- 
stand why they act thus and thus, what their 
difficulties are, what their " explanation " is, and 
how friction can be avoided. So I ought to re- 
flect, morning after morning, until my brain is 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 57 

saturated with the cases of these individuals. 
Here is a course of discipline. If I follow it I 
shall gradually lose the preposterous habit of 
blaming, and I shall have laid the foundations of 
that quiet, unshakable self-possession which is 
the indispensable preliminary of conduct accord- 
ing to reason, of thorough efficiency in the ma- 
chine of happiness. But something in me, 
something distinctly base, says : " Yes. The put- 
yourself-in-his-place business over again! The 
do-unto-others business over again ! " Just so ! 
Something in me is ashamed of being " moral." 
(You all know the feeling!) Well, morals are 
naught but another name for reasonable con- 
duct; a higher and more practical form of ego- 
tism — an egotism which, while freeing others, 
frees myself. I have tried the lower form of 
egotism. And it has failed. If I am afraid of 
being moral, if I prefer to cut off my nose to 
spite my face, well, I must accept the conse- 
quences. But truth will prevail. 



VIII 
THE DAILY FRICTION 

IT is with common daily affairs that I am 
now dealing, not with heroic enterprises, 
ambitions, martyrdoms. Take the day, the 
ordinary day in the ordinary house or office. 
Though it comes seven times a week, and is the 
most banal thing imaginable, it is quite worth at- 
tention. How does the machine get through it? 
Ah! the best that can be said of the machine is 
that it does get through it, somehow. The fric- 
tion, though seldom such as to bring matters to 
a standstill, is frequent — the sort of friction that, 
when it occurs in a bicycle, is just sufficient to 
annoy the rider, but not sufficient to make him 
get off the machine and examine the bearings. 
Occasionally the friction is very loud; indeed, 
disturbing, and at rarer intervals it shrieks, like 
an omnibus brake out of order. You know those 
days when you have the sensation that life is 
not large enough to contain the household or the 
office-staff, when the business of intercourse may 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 59 

be compared to the manoeuvres of two people 
who, having awakened with a bad headache, are 
obliged to dress simultaneously in a very small 
bedroom. " After you with that towel ! " in ac- 
cents of bitter, grinding politeness. " If you 
could kindly move your things off this chair ! " 
in a voice that would blow brains out if it were 
a bullet. I venture to say that you know those 
days. " But," you reply, " such days are few. 
Usually ... ! " Well, usually, the friction, 
though less intense, is still proceeding. We grow 
accustomed to it. We scarcely notice it, as a 
person in a stuffy chamber will scarcely notice 
the stuffiness. But the deteriorating influence 
due to friction goes on, even if unperceived. And 
one morning we perceive its ravages — and write 
a letter to the Telegraph to inquire whether life 
is worth living, or whether marriage is a failure, 
or whether men are more polite than women. 
The proof that friction, in various and varying 
degrees, is practically continuous in most house- 
holds lies in the fact that when we chance on a 
household where there is no friction we are 
startled. We can't recover from the phenome- 
non. And in describing this household to our 
friends, we say : " They get on so well together," 



60 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

as if we were saying : " They have wings and 
can fly ! Just fancy ! Did you ever hear of such 
a thing? " 

Ninety per cent of all daily friction is caused 
by tone — mere tone of voice. Try this experi- 
ment. Say : " Oh, you little darling, you sweet 
pet, you entirely charming creature ! " to a baby 
or a dog; but roar these delightful epithets in 
the tone of saying : " You infernal little nui- 
sance ! If I hear another sound I '11 break every 
bone in your body ! " The baby will infallibly 
whimper, and the dog will infallibly mouch off. 
True, a dog is not a human being, neither is a 
baby. They cannot understand. It is precisely 
because they cannot understand and articulate 
words that the experiment is valuable; for it 
separates the effect of the tone from the effect of 
the words spoken. He who speaks, speaks twice. 
His words convey his thought, and his tone con- 
veys his mental attitude towards the person 
spoken to. And certainly the attitude, so far as 
friction goes, is more important than the thought. 
Your wife may say to you : " I shall buy that 
hat I spoke to you about." And you may reply, 
quite sincerely, " As you please." But it will 
depend on your tone whether you convey : " As 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 61 

you please. I am sympathetically anxious that 
your innocent caprices should be indulged." Or 
whether you convey : " As you please. Only 
don't bother me with hats. I am above hats. A 
great deal too much money is spent in this house 
on hats. However, I 'm helpless ! " Or whether 
you convey : " As you please, heart of my heart, 
but if you would like to be a nice girl, go gently. 
We 're rather tight." I need not elaborate. I 
am sure of being comprehended. 

As tone is the expression of attitude, it is, of 
course, caused by attitude. The frictional tone 
is chiefly due to that general attitude of blame 
which I have already condemned as being absurd 
and unjustifiable. As, by constant watchful dis- 
cipline, we gradually lose this silly attitude of 
blame, so the tone will of itself gradually change. 
But the two ameliorations can proceed together, 
and it is a curious thing that an agreeable tone, 
artificially and deliberately adopted, will influ- 
ence the mental attitude almost as much as the 
mental attitude will influence the tone. If you 
honestly feel resentful against someone, but, 
having understood the foolishness of fury, inten- 
tionally mask your fury under a persuasive tone, 
your fury will at once begin to abate. You will 



62 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

be led into a rational train of thought; you will 
see that after all the object of your resentment 
has a right to exist, and that he is neither a door- 
mat nor a scoundrel, and that anyhow nothing 
is to be gained, and much is to be lost, by fury. 
You will see that fury is unworthy of you. 

Do you remember the gentleness of the tone 
which you employed after the healing of your 
first quarrel with a beloved companion? Do you 
remember the persuasive tone which you used 
when you wanted to obtain something from a 
difficult person on whom your happiness de- 
pended? Why should not your tone always 
combine these qualities? Why should you not 
carefully school your tone? Is it beneath you 
to ensure the largest possible amount of your 
own " way " by the simplest means? Or is there 
at the back of your mind that peculiarly English 
and German idea that politeness, sympathy, and 
respect for another immortal soul would imply 
deplorable weakness on your part? You say that 
your happiness does not depend on every person 
whom you happen to speak to. Yes, it does. 
Your happiness is always dependent on just that 
person. Produce friction, and you suffer. Idle 
to argue that the person has no business to be 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 63 

upset by your tone ! You have caused avoidable 
friction, simply because your machine for deal- 
ing with your environment was suffering from 
pride, ignorance, or thoughtlessness. You say I 
am making a mountain out of a mole-hill. No! 
I am making a mountain out of ten million mole- 
hills. And that is what life does. It is the little 
but continuous causes that have great effects. I 
repeat: Why not deliberately adopt a gentle, 
persuasive tone — just to see what the results 
are? Surely you are not ashamed to be wise. 
You may smile superiorly as you read this. Yet 
you know very well that more than once you 
ha<ve resolved to use a gentle and persuasive tone 
on all occasions, and that the sole reason why 
you had that fearful shindy yesterday with your 
cousin's sister-in-law was that you had long since 
failed to keep your resolve. But you were of 
my mind once, and more than once. 

What you have to do is to teach the new habit 
to your brain by daily concentration on it; by 
forcing your brain to think of nothing else for 
half an hour of a morning. After a time the brain 
will begin to remember automatically. For, of 
course, the explanation of your previous fail- 
ures is that your brain, undisciplined, merely 



64 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

forgot at the critical moment. The tone was out 
of your mouth before your brain had waked up. 
It is necessary to watch, as though you were a 
sentinel, not only against the wrong tone, but 
against the other symptoms of the attitude of 
blame. Such as the frown. It is necessary to 
regard yourself constantly, and in minute detail. 
You lie in bed for half an hour and enthusiasti- 
cally concentrate on this beautiful new scheme 
of the right tone. You rise, and because you 
don't achieve a proper elegance of necktie at the 
first knotting, you frown and swear and clench 
your teeth! There is a symptom of the wrong 
attitude towards your environment. You are 
awake, but your brain isn't. It is in such a 
symptom that you may judge yourself. And not 
a trifling symptom, either! If you will frown 
at a necktie, if you will use language to a necktie 
which no gentleman should use to a necktie, 
what will you be capable of to a responsible 
being? . . . Yes, it is very difficult. But it can 
be done. 



IX 

" FIRE ! " 

IN this business of daily living, of ordinary 
usage of the machine in hourly intercourse, 
there occurs sometimes a phenomenon 
which is the cause of a great deal of trouble, and 
the result of a very ill-tended machine. It is a 
phenomenon impossible to ignore, and yet, so 
shameful is it, so degrading, so shocking, so 
miserable, that I hesitate to mention it. For one 
class of reader is certain to ridicule me, loftily 
saying : " One really does n't expect to find this 
sort of thing in print nowadays ! " And another 
class of reader is certain to get angry. Never- 
theless, as one of my main objects in the present 
book is to discuss matters which "people don't 
talk about," I shall discuss this matter. But my 
diffidence in doing so is such that I must ap- 
proach it deviously, describing it first by means 
of a figure. 

Imagine that, looking at a man's house, you 
suddenly perceive it to be on fire. The flame is 



66 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

scarcely perceptible. You could put it out if 
you had a free hand. But you have not got a 
free hand. It is his house, not yours. He may 
or may not know that his house is burning. You 
are aware by experience, however, that if you 
directed his attention to the flame, the effect of 
your warning would be exceedingly singular, 
almost incredible. For the effect would be that 
he would instantly begin to strike matches, pour 
on petroleum, and fan the flame, violently re- 
senting interference. Therefore you can only 
stand and watch, hoping that he will notice the 
flames before they are beyond control, and ex- 
tinguish them. The probability is, however, 
that he will notice the flames too late. And, 
powerless to avert disaster, you are condemned, 
therefore, to watch the damage of valuable prop- 
erty. The flames leap higher and higher, and 
they do not die down till they have burned them- 
selves out. You avert your gaze from the 
spectacle, and until you are gone the owner 
of the house pretends that nothing has oc- 
curred. When alone, he curses himself for his 
carelessness. 

The foregoing is meant to be a description of 
what happens when a man passes through the 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 67 

incendiary experience known as " losing his 
temper." (There! the cat of my chapter is out 
of the bag!) A man who has lost his temper is 
simply being " burnt out." His constitutes one 
of the most curious and (for everybody) humili- 
ating spectacles that life offers. It is an insur- 
rection, a boiling-over, a sweeping storm. Dig- 
nity, common sense, justice are shrivelled up 
and destroyed. Anarchy reigns. The devil has 
broken his chain. Instinct is stamping on the 
face of reason. And in that man civilisation has 
temporarily receded millions of years. Of course, 
the thing amounts to a nervous disease, and I 
think it is almost universal. You at once pro- 
test that you never lose your temper — have n't 
lost your temper for ages ! But do you not mean 
that you have not smashed furniture for ages? 
These fires are of varying intensities. Some of 
them burn very dully. Yet they burn. One man 
loses his temper ; another is merely " ruffled." 
But the event is the same in kind. When you are 
" ruffled," when you are conscious of a resentful 
vibration that surprises all your being, when 
your voice changes, when you notice a change 
in the demeanour of your companion, who sees 
that he has " touched a tender point," you may 



68 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

not go to the length of smashing furniture, but 
you have had a fire, and your dignity is dam- 
aged. You admit it to yourself afterwards. I 
am sure you know what I mean. And I am 
nearly sure that you, with your courageous can- 
dour, will admit that from time to time you suffer 
from these mysterious " fires." 

" Temper," one of the plagues of human soci- 
ety, is generally held to be incurable, save by 
the vague process of exercising self-control — a 
process which seldom has any beneficial results. 
It is regarded now as small-pox used to be re- 
garded — as a visitation of Providence, which 
must be borne. But I do not hold it to be in- 
curable. I am convinced that it is permanently 
curable. And its eminent importance as a nui- 
sance to mankind at large deserves, I think, that 
it should receive particular attention. Anyhow, 
I am strongly against the visitation of Provi- 
dence theory, as being unscientific, primitive, 
and conducive to unashamed taissez-atter. A 
man can be master in his own house. If he can- 
not be master by simple force of will, he can be 
master by ruse and wile. I would employ clever- 
ness to maintain the throne of reason when it is 
likely to be upset in the mind by one of these 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 69 

devastating and disgraceful insurrections of brute 
instinct. 

It is useless for a man in the habit of losing 
or mislaying his temper to argue with himself 
that such a proceeding is folly, that it serves no 
end, and does nothing but harm. It is useless 
for him to argue that in allowing his temper to 
stray he is probably guilty of cruelty, and cer- 
tainly guilty of injustice to those persons who 
are forced to witness the loss. It is useless for 
him to argue that a man of uncertain temper in 
a house is like a man who goes about a house 
with a loaded revolver sticking from his pocket, 
and that all considerations of fairness and reason 
have to be subordinated in that house to the 
fear of the revolver, and that such peace as is 
maintained in that house is often a shameful and 
an unjust peace. These arguments will not be 
strong enough to prevail against one of the most 
powerful and capricious of all habits. This 
habit must be met and conquered (and it can 
be!) by an even more powerful quality in the 
human mind; I mean the universal human hor- 
ror of looking ridiculous. The man who loses 
his temper often thinks he is doing something 
rather fine and majestic. On the contrary, so 



70 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

far is this from being the fact, he is merely 
making an ass of himself. He is merely parading 
himself as an undignified fool, as that supremely 
contemptible figure — a grown-up baby. He 
may intimidate a feeble companion, by his raging, 
or by the dark sullenness of a more subdued 
flame, but in the heart of even the weakest com- 
panion is a bedrock feeling of contempt for him. 
The way in which a man of uncertain temper is 
treated by his friends proves that they despise 
him, for they do not treat him as a reasonable 
being. How should they treat him as a reason- 
able being when the tenure of his reason is so 
insecure? And if only he could hear what is 
said of him behind his back ! . . . 

The invalid can cure himself by teaching his 
brain the habit of dwelling upon his extreme 
fatuity. Let him concentrate regularly, with 
intense fixation, upon the ideas : " When I lose 
my temper, when I get ruffled, when that mys- 
terious vibration runs through me, I am making 
a donkey of myself, a donkey, and a donkey! 
You understand, a preposterous donkey! I am 
behaving like a great baby. I look a fool. I am 
a spectacle bereft of dignity. Everybody de- 
spises me, smiles at me in secret, disdains the 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 71 

idiotic ass with whom it is impossible to 
reason." 

Ordinarily the invalid disguises from himself 
this aspect of his disease, and his brain will in- 
stinctively avoid it as much as it can. But in 
hours of calm he can slowly and regularly force 
his brain, by the practice of concentration, to 
familiarise itself with just this aspect, so that in 
time its instinct will be to think first, and not 
last, of just this aspect. When he has arrived 
at that point he is saved. No man who, at the 
very inception of the fire, is visited with a clear 
vision of himself as an arrant ass and pitiable 
object of contempt, will lack the volition to put 
the fire out. But, be it noted, he will not succeed 
until he can do it at once. A fire is a fire, and 
the engines must gallop by themselves out of the 
station instantly. This means the acquirement 
of a mental habit. During the preliminary stages 
of the cure he should, of course, avoid inflam- 
mable situations. This is a perfectly simple thing 
to do, if the brain has been disciplined out of its 
natural forgetfulness. 



X 

MISCHIEVOUSLY OVERWORK- 
ING IT 

I HAVE dealt with the two general major 
causes of friction in the daily use of the 
, machine. I will now deal with a minor 
cause, and make an end of mere dailiness. This 
minor cause — and after all I do not know that 
its results are so trifling as to justify the epithet 
" minor " — is the straining of the machine by 
forcing it to do work which it was never intended 
to do. Although we are incapable of persuading 
our machines to do effectively that which they 
are bound to do somehow, we continually over- 
burden them with entirely unnecessary and inept 
tasks. We cannot, it would seem, let things 
alone. 

For example, in the ordinary household the 
amount of machine horse-power expended in 
fighting for the truth is really quite absurd. This 
pure zeal for the establishment and general ad- 
mission of the truth is usually termed " contra- 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 73 

dictoriness." But, of course, it is not that; it is 
something higher. My wife states that the 
Joneses have gone into a new flat, of which the 
rent is £165 a year. Now, Jones has told me 
personally that the rent of his new flat is £156 
a year. I correct my wife. Knowing that she 
is in the right, she corrects me. She cannot bear 
that a falsehood should prevail. It is not a ques- 
tion of £9, it is a question of truth. Her en- 
thusiasm for truth excites my enthusiasm for 
truth. Five minutes ago I did n't care twopence 
whether the rent of the Joneses' new flat was 
£165 or £156 or £1,056 a year. But now I 
care intensely that it is £156. I have formed 
myself into a select society for the propagating 
of the truth about the rent of the Joneses' new 
flat, and my wife has done the same. In elo- 
quence, in argumentative skill, in strict super- 
vision of our tempers, we each of us squander 
enormous quantities of that h.-p. which is so 
precious to us. And the net effect is naught. 

Now, if one of us two had understood the ele- 
mentary principles of human engineering, that 
one would have said (privately) : " Truth is in- 
destructible. Truth will out. Truth is never in 
a hurry. If it doesn't come out to-day it will 



74 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

come out to-morrow or next year. It can take 
care of itself. Ultimately my wife (or my hus- 
band) will learn the essential cosmic truth about 
the rent of the Joneses' new flat. I already know 
it, and the moment when she (or he) knows it 
also will be the moment of my triumph. She 
(or he) will not celebrate my triumph openly, 
but it will be none the less real. And my reputa- 
tion for accuracy and calm restraint will be con- 
solidated. If, by a rare mischance, I am in 
error, it will be vastly better for me in the day 
of my undoing that I have not been too positive 
now. Besides, nobody has appointed me sole 
custodian of the great truth concerning the rent 
of the Joneses' new flat. I was not brought into 
the world to be a safe-deposit, and more urgent 
matters summon me to effort." If one of us had 
meditated thus, much needless friction would 
have been avoided and power saved; amour- 
propre would not have been exposed to risks; 
the sacred cause of truth would not in the least 
have suffered; and the rent of the Joneses' new 
flat would anyhow have remained exactly what 
it is. 

In addition to straining the machine by our 
excessive anxiety for the spread of truth, we give 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 75 

a very great deal too much attention to the 
state of other people's machines. I cannot too 
strongly, too sarcastically, deprecate this aston- 
ishing habit. It will be found to be rife in nearly 
every household and in nearly every office. We 
are most of us endeavouring to rearrange the 
mechanism in other heads than our own. This 
is always dangerous and generally futile. Con- 
sidering the difficulty we have in our own brains, 
where our efforts are sure of being accepted as 
well-meant, and where we have at any rate a 
rough notion of the machine's construction, our 
intrepidity in adventuring among the delicate 
adjustments of other brains is remarkable. We 
are cursed by too much of the missionary spirit. 
We must needs voyage into the China of our 
brother's brain, and explain there that things are 
seriously wrong in that heathen land, and make 
ourselves unpleasant in the hope of getting them 
put right. We have all our own brain and body 
on which to wreak our personality, but this is 
not enough; we must extend our personality 
further, just as though we were a colonising 
world-power intoxicated by the idea of the 
" white man's burden." 

One of the central secrets of efficient daily 



76 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

living is to leave our daily companions alone a 
great deal more than we do, and attend to our- 
selves. If a daily companion is conducting his 
life upon principles which you know to be false, 
and with results which you feel to be unpleasant, 
the safe rule is to keep your mouth shut. Or if, 
out of your singular conceit, you are compelled 
to open it, open it with all precautions, and with 
the formal politeness you would use to a stranger. 
Intimacy is no excuse for rough manners, though 
the majority of us seem to think it is. You are 
not in charge of the universe ; you are in charge 
of yourself. You cannot hope to manage the 
universe in your spare time, and if you try you 
will probably make a mess of such part of the 
universe as you touch, while gravely neglecting 
yourself. In every family there is generally 
someone whose meddlesome interest in other 
machines leads to serious friction in his own. 
Criticise less, even in the secrecy of your cham- 
ber. And do not blame at all. Accept your 
environment and adapt yourself to it in silence, 
instead of noisily attempting to adapt your en- 
vironment to yourself. Here is true wisdom. 
You have no business trespassing beyond the 
confines of your own individuality. In so tres- 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 77 

passing you are guilty of impertinence. This is 
obvious. And yet one of the chief activities of 
home-life consists in prancing about at random 
on other people's private lawns. What I say 
applies even to the relations between parents and 
children. And though my precept is exaggerated, 
it is purposely exaggerated in order effectively 
to balance the exaggeration in the opposite 
direction. 

All individualities, other than one's own, are 
part of one's environment. The evolutionary 
process is going on all right, and they are a por- 
tion of it. Treat them as inevitable. Tp assert 
that they are inevitable is not to assert that they 
are unalterable. Only the alteration of them is 
not primarily your affair; it is theirs. Your 
affair is to use them, as they are, without 
self-righteousness, blame, or complaint, for the 
smooth furtherance of your own ends. There is 
no intention here to rob them of responsibility 
by depriving them of free-will while saddling 
you with responsibility as a free agent. As your 
environment they must be accepted as inevita- 
ble, because they are inevitable. But as centres 
themselves they have their own responsibility: 
which is not yours* The historic question: 



78 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

" Have we free-will, or are we the puppets of 
determinism?" enters now. As a question it is 
fascinating and futile. It has never been, and it 
never will be, settled. The theory of determin- 
ism cannot be demolished by argument. But in 
his heart every man, including the most obstinate 
supporter of the theory, demolishes it every hour 
of every day. On the other hand, the theory of 
free-will can be demolished by ratiocination! So 
much the worse for ratiocination! If <we regard 
ourselves as free agents, and the personalities 
surrounding us as the puppets of determinism, 
we shall have arrived at the working compromise 
from which the finest results of living can be 
obtained. The philosophic experience of cen- 
turies, if it has proved anything, has proved this. 
And the man who acts upon it in the common, 
banal contacts and collisions of the difficult ex- 
periment which we call daily life, will speedily 
become convinced of its practical worth. 



XI 

AN INTERLUDE 

FOR ten chapters you have stood it, but 
not without protest. I know the feeling 
which is in your minds, and which has 
manifested itself in numerous criticisms of my 
ideas. That feeling may be briefly translated, 
perhaps, thus : " This is all very well, but — it 
is n't true, not a bit ! It 's only a fairy-tale that 
you have been telling us. Miracles don't hap- 
pen," etc. I, on my part, have a feeling that 
unless I take your feeling in hand at once, and 
firmly deal with it, I had better put my shutters 
up, for you will have got into the way of regard- 
ing me simply as a source of idle amusement. 
Already I can perceive, from the expressions of 
some critics, that, so far as they are concerned, 
I might just as well not have written a word. 
Therefore at this point I pause, in order to insist 
once more upon what I began by saying. 

The burden of your criticism is : " Human 
nature is always the same. I know my faults. 



80 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

But it is useless to tell me about them. I can't 
alter them. I was born like that." The fatal 
weakness of this argument is, first, that it is 
based on a complete falsity; and second, that it 
puts you in an untenable position. Human na- 
ture does change. Nothing can be more unscien- 
tific, more hopelessly mediaeval, than to imagine 
that it does not. It changes like everything else. 
You can't see it change. True! But then you 
can't see the grass growings — not unless you 
arise very early. 

Is human nature the same now as in the days 
of Babylonian civilisation, when the social ma- 
chine was oiled by drenchings of blood? Is it 
the same now as in the days of Greek civilisation, 
when there was no such thing as romantic love 
between the sexes? Is it the same now as it was 
during the centuries when constant friction had 
to provide its own cure in the shape of constant 
war? Is it the same now as it was on March 
2nd, 1819, when the British Government officially 
opposed a motion to consider the severity of the 
criminal laws (which included capital punish- 
ment for cutting down a tree, and other sensible 
dodges against friction), and were defeated by 
a majority of only nineteen votes? Is it the 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 81 

same now as in the year 1883, when the first 
S.P.C.C. was formed in England? 

If you consider that human nature is still the 
same, you should instantly go out and make a 
bonfire of the works of Spencer, Darwin, and 
Wallace, and then return to enjoy the purely joc- 
ular side of the present volume. If you admit 
that it has changed, let me ask you how it has 
changed, unless by the continual infinitesimal 
efforts, upon themselves, of individual men, like 
you and me. Did you suppose it was changed 
by magic, or by acts of parliament, or by the 
action of groups on persons, and not of persons 
on groups? Let me tell you that human nature 
has changed since yesterday. Let me tell you 
that to-day reason has a more powerful voice in 
the directing of instinct than it had yesterday. 
Let me tell you that to-day the friction of the 
machines is less screechy and grinding than it 
was yesterday. 

" You were born like that, and you can't alter 
yourself, and so it's no use talking." If you 
really believe this, why make any effort at all? 
Why not let the whole business beautifully slide 
and yield to your instincts? What object can 
there be in trying to control yourself in any 



82 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

manner whatever if you are unalterable? Assert 
yourself to be unalterable, and you assert your- 
self a fatalist. Assert yourself a fatalist, and you 
free yourself from all moral responsibility — and 
other people, too. Well, then, act up to your 
convictions, if convictions they are. If you can't 
alter yourself, I can't alter myself, and supposing 
that I come along and bash you on the head and 
steal your purse, you can't blame me. You can 
only, on recovering consciousness, affectionately 
grasp my hand and murmur : " Don't apologise, 
my dear fellow; we can't alter ourselves." 

This, you say, is absurd. It is. That is one 
of my innumerable points. The truth is, you do 
not really believe that you cannot alter yourself. 
What is the matter with you is just what is the 
matter with me — sheer idleness. You hate get- 
ting up in the morning, and to excuse your inex- 
cusable indolence you talk big about Fate. Just 
as " patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," 
so fatalism is the last refuge of a shirker. But 
you deceive no one, least of all yourself. You 
have not, rationally, a leg to stand on. At this 
juncture, because I have made you laugh, you 
consent to say : " I do try, all I can. But I can 
only alter myself a very little. By constitution 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 83 

I am mentally idle. I can't help that, can I ? " 
Well, so long as you are not the only absolutely 
unchangeable thing in a universe of change, I 
don't mind. It is something for you to admit 
that you can alter yourself even a very little. 
The difference between our philosophies is now 
only a question of degree. 

In the application of any system of perfecting 
the machine, no two persons will succeed equally. 
From the disappointed tone of some of your 
criticisms it might be fancied that I had adver- 
tised a system for making archangels out of 
tailor's dummies. Such was not my hope. I 
have no belief in miracles. But I know that 
when a thing is thoroughly well done it often has 
the air of being a miracle. My sole aim is to in- 
sist that every man shall perfect his machine to 
the best of his powers, not to the best of some- 
body else's powers. I do not indulge in any hope 
that a man can be better than his best self. I am, 
however, convinced that every man fails to be 
his best self a great deal oftener than he need 
fail — for the reason that his will-power, be it 
great or small, is not directed according to the 
principles of common sense. 

Common sense will surely lead a man to ask 



84 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

the question : " Why did my actions yesterday 
contradict my reason? " The reply to this ques- 
tion will nearly always be : " Because at the 
critical moment I forgot." The supreme expla- 
nation of the abortive results of so many efforts 
at self-alteration, the supreme explanation of our 
frequent miserable scurrying into a doctrine of 
fatalism, is simple forgetfulness. It is not force 
that we lack, but the skill to remember exactly 
what our reason would have us do or think at 
the moment itself. How is this skill to be ac- 
quired? It can only be acquired, as skill at 
games is acquired, by practice; by the training 
of the organ involved to such a point that the 
organ acts rightly by instinct instead of wrongly 
by instinct. There are degrees of success in this 
procedure, but there is no such phenomenon as 
complete failure. 

Habits which increase friction can be replaced 
by habits which lessen friction. Habits which 
arrest development can be replaced by habits 
which encourage development. And as a habit 
is formed naturally, so it can be formed artifi- 
cially, by imitation of the unconscious process, 
by accustoming the brain to the new idea. Let 
me, as an example, refer again to the minor sub- 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 85 

ject of daily friction, and, within that subject, 
to the influence of tone. A man employs a fric- 
tional tone through habit. The fractional tone 
is an instinct with him. But if he had a quarter 
of an hour to reflect before speaking, and if dur- 
ing that quarter of an hour he could always listen 
to arguments against the frictional tone, his use 
of the frictional tone would rapidly diminish; 
his reason would conquer his instinct. As things 
are, his instinct conquers his reason by a surprise 
attack, by taking it unawares. Regular daily 
concentration of the brain, for a certain period, 
upon the non-frictional tone, and the immense 
advantages of its use, will gradually set up in the 
brain a new habit of thinking about the non- 
frictional tone; until at length the brain, disci- 
plined, turns to the correct act before the old, 
silly instinct can capture it; and ultimately a 
new sagacious instinct will supplant the old 
one. 

This is the rationale. It applies to all habits. 
Any person can test its efficiency in any habit. 
I care not whether he be of strong or weak will 
— he can test it. He will soon see the tremen- 
dous difference between merely " making a good 
resolution " — (he has been doing that all his 



86 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

life without any very brilliant consequences) — 
and concentrating the brain for a given time ex- 
clusively upon a good resolution. Concentra- 
tion, the efficient mastery of the brain — all is 
there ! 



XII 
AN INTEREST IN LIFE 

ML FTER a certain period of mental discipline, 
LjL of deliberate habit-forming and habit- 
™ ""breaking, such as I have been indicating, 
a man will begin to acquire at any rate a super- 
ficial knowledge, a nodding acquaintance, with 
that wonderful and mysterious affair, his brain, 
and he will also begin to perceive how important 
a factor in daily life is the control of his brain. 
He will assuredly be surprised at the miracles 
which lie between his collar and his hat, in that 
queer box that he calls his head. For the effects 
that can be accomplished by mere steady, per- 
sistent thinking must appear to be miracles to 
apprentices in the practice of thought. When 
once a man, having passed an unhappy day be- 
cause his clumsy, negligent brain forgot to con- 
trol his instincts at a critical moment, has said 
to his brain : " I will force you, by concentrating 
you on that particular point, to act efficiently the 
next time similar circumstances arise," and when 



88 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

he has carried out his intention, and when the 
awkward circumstances have recurred, and his 
brain, disciplined, has done its work, and so pre- 
vented unhappiness — then that man will regard 
his brain with a new eye. " By Jove ! " he will 
say ; " I Ve stopped one source of unhappiness, 
anyway. There was a time when I should have 
made a fool of myself in a little domestic crisis 
such as to-day's. But I have gone safely through 
it. I am all right. She is all right. The atmo- 
sphere is not dangerous with undischarged elec- 
tricity! And all because my brain, being in 
proper condition, watched firmly over my in- 
stincts! I must keep this up." He will peer into 
that brain more and more. He will see more 
and more of its possibilities. He will have a new 
and a supreme interest in life. A garden is a 
fairly interesting thing. But the cultivation of 
a garden is as dull as cold mutton compared to 
the cultivation of a brain ; and wet weather won't 
interfere with digging, planting, and pruning in 
the box. 

In due season the man whose hobby is his 
brain will gradually settle down into a daily 
routine, with which routine he will start the 
day. The idea at the back of the mind of the 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 89 

ordinary man (by the ordinary man I mean the 
man whose brain is not his hobby) is almost 
always this : " There are several things at pres- 
ent hanging over me — worries, unfulfilled am- 
bitions, unrealised desires. As soon as these 
tjiings are definitely settled, then I shall begin 
to live and enjoy myself." That is the ordinary 
man's usual idea. He has it from his youth to 
his old age. He is invariably waiting for some- 
thing to happen before he really begins to live. 
I am sure that if you are an ordinary man (of 
course, you are n't, I know) you will admit that 
this is true of you; you exist in the hope that 
one day things will be sufficiently smoothed out 
for you to begin to live. That is just where you 
differ from the man whose brain is his hobby. 
His daily routine consists in a meditation in the 
following vein : " This day is before me. The 
circumstances of this day are my environment; 
they are the material out, of which, by means of 
my brain, I have to live and be happy and to 
refrain from causing unhappiness in- other people. 
It is the business of my brain to make use of 
this material. My brain is in its box for that 
sole purpose. Not to-morrow! Not next year! 
Not when I have made my fortune! Not when 



go THE HUMAN MACHINE 

my sick child is out of danger ! Not when my wife 
has returned to her senses ! Not when my salary 
is raised! Not when I have passed that exami- 
nation! Not when my indigestion is better! 
But now! To-day, exactly as to-day is! The 
facts of to-day, which in my unregeneracy I 
regarded primarily as anxieties, nuisances, im- 
pediments, I now regard as so much raw material 
from which my brain has to weave a tissue of 
life that is comely." 

And then he foresees the day as well as he 
can. His experience teaches him where he will 
have difficulty, and he administers to his brain 
the lessons of which it will have most need. He 
carefully looks the machine over, and arranges 
it specially for the sort of road which he knows 
that it will have to traverse. And especially he 
readjusts his point of view, for his point of view 
is continually getting wrong. He is continually 
seeing worries where he ought to see material. 
He may notice, for instance, a patch on the back 
of his head, and he wonders whether it is the 
result of age or of disease, or whether it has 
always been there. And his wife tells him he 
must call at the chemist's and satisfy himself at 
once. Frightful nuisance! Age! The endless 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 91 

trouble of a capillary complaint! Calling at the 
chemist's will make him late at the office! etc., 
etc. But then his skilled, efficient brain inter- 
venes : " What peculiarly interesting material 
this mean and petty circumstance yields for the 
practice of philosophy and right living ! " And 
again: "Is this to ruffle you, O my soul? Will 
it serve any end whatever that I should buzz 
nervously round this circumstance instead of 
attending to my usual business? " 

I give this as an example of the necessity of 
adjusting the point of view, and of the manner 
in which a brain habituated by suitable concen- 
tration to correct thinking will come to the rescue 
in unexpected contingencies. Naturally it will 
work with greater certainty in the manipulation 
of difficulties that are expected, that can be " seen 
coming " ; and preparation for the expected is, 
fortunately, preparation for the unexpected. The 
man who commences his day by a steady con- 
templation of the dangers which the next sixteen 
hours are likely to furnish, and by arming him- 
self specially against those dangers, has thereby 
armed himself, though to a less extent, against 
dangers which he did not dream of. But the 
routine must be fairly elastic. It may be neces- 



92 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

sary to commence several days in succession — 
for a week or for months, even — with disciplin- 
ing the brain in one particular detail, to the tem- 
porary neglect of other matters. It is astonish- 
ing how you can weed every inch of a garden 
path and keep it in the most meticulous order, 
and then one morning find in the very middle of 
it a lusty, full-grown plant whose roots are posi- 
tively mortised in granite! All gardeners are 
familiar with such discoveries. 

But a similar discovery, though it entails hard 
labour on him, will not disgust the man whose 
hobby is his brain. For the discovery in itself 
is part of the material out of which he has to 
live. If a man is to turn everything whatsoever 
into his own calm, dignity, and happiness, he 
must make this use even of his own failures. 
He must look at them as phenomena of the brain 
in that box, and cheerfully set about taking meas- 
ures to prevent their repetition. All that happens 
to him, success or check, will but serve to in- 
crease his interest in the contents of that box. 
I seem to hear you saying : " And a fine egotist 
he '11 be! " Well, he '11 be the right sort of ego- 
tist. The average man is not half enough of an 
egotist. If egotism means a terrific interest in 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 93 

one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to effi- 
cient living. There is no getting away from that. 
But if egotism means selfishness, the serious stu- 
dent of the craft of daily living will not be an 
egotist for more than about a year. In a year 
he will have proved the ineptitude of egotism. 



XIII 
SUCCESS AND FAILURE 

I AM sadly aware that these brief chapters 
will be apt to convey, especially to the 
trustful and enthusiastic reader, a false im- 
pression; the impression of simplicity; and that 
when experience has roughly corrected this im- 
pression, the said reader, unless he is most sol- 
emnly warned, may abandon the entire enter- 
prise in a fit of disgust, and for ever afterwards 
maintain a cynical and impolite attitude towards 
all theories of controlling the human machine. 
Now, the enterprise is not a simple one. It is 
based on one simple principle — the conscious 
discipline of the brain by selected habits of 
thought — but it is just about as complicated as 
anything well could be. Advanced golf is child's 
play compared to it. The man who briefly says 
to himself: "I will get up at 8, and from 8.30 
to 9 I will examine and control my brain, and so 
my life will at once be instantly improved out 
of recognition" — that man is destined to un- 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 95 

pleasant surprises. Progress will be slow. Prog- 
ress may appear to be quite rapid at first, and 
then a period of futility may set in, and the 
would-be vanquisher of his brain may suffer a 
series of the most deadly defeats. And in his 
pessimism he may imagine that all his pains have 
gone for nothing, and that the unserious loung- 
ers in exhibition gardens and readers of novels 
in parlours are in the right of it after all. 
He may even feel rather ashamed of himself 
for having been, as he thinks, taken in by spe- 
cious promises, like the purchaser of a quack 
medicine. 

The conviction that great effort has been made 
and no progress achieved is the chief of the 
dangers that affront the beginner in machine- 
tending. It is, I will assert positively, in every 
case a conviction unjustified by the facts, and 
usually it is the mere result of reaction after 
fatigue, encouraged by the instinct for laziness. 
I do not think it will survive an impartial ex- 
amination; but I know that a man, in order to 
find an excuse for abandoning further effort, is 
capable of convincing himself that past effort has 
yielded no fruit at all. So curious is the human 
machine. I beg every student of himself to con- 



96 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

sider this remark with all the intellectual honesty 
at his disposal. It is a grave warning. 

When the machine-tender observes that he is 
frequently changing his point of view; when he 
notices that what he regarded as the kernel of 
the difficulty yesterday has sunk to a triviality 
to-day, being replaced by a fresh phenomenon; 
when he arises one morning and by means of a 
new, unexpected glimpse into the recesses of the 
machine perceives that hitherto he has been quite 
wrong and must begin again; when he wonders 
how on earth he could have been so blind and so 
stupid as not to see what now he sees ; when the 
new vision is veiled by new disappointments and 
narrowed by continual reservations; when he is 
overwhelmed by the complexity of his under- 
taking — then let him enhearten himself, for he 
is succeeding. The history of success in any art 
— and machine-tending is an art — is a history 
of recommencements, of the dispersal and re- 
forming of doubts, of an ever-increasing concep- 
tion of the extent of the territory unconquered, 
and an ever-decreasing conception of the extent 
of the territory conquered. 

It is remarkable that, though no enterprise 
could possibly present more diverse and change- 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 97 

ful excitements than the mastering of the brain, 
the second great danger which threatens its ulti- 
mate success is nothing but a mere drying-up of 
enthusiasm for it! One would have thought 
that in an affair which concerned him so nearly, 
in an affair whose results might be in a very 
strict sense vital to him, in an affair upon which 
his happiness and misery might certainly turn, 
a man would not weary from sheer tedium. 
Nevertheless, it is so. Again and again I have 
noticed the abandonment, temporary or perma- 
nent, of this mighty and thrilling enterprise from 
simple lack of interest. And I imagine that, in 
practically all cases save those in which an excep- 
tional original force of will renders the enterprise 
scarcely necessary, the interest in it will languish 
unless it is regularly nourished from without. 
Now, the interest in it cannot be nourished from 
without by means of conversation with other 
brain-tamers. There are certain things which 
may not be discussed by sanely organised people ; 
and this is one. The affair is too intimate, and 
it is also too moral. Even after only a few min- 
utes' vocalisation on this subject a deadly infec- 
tion seems to creep into the air — the infection 
°f priggishness, (Or am I mistaken, and do I 



9 8 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

fancy this horror? No; I cannot believe that 
I am mistaken.) 

Hence the nourishment must be obtained by 
reading; a little reading every day. I suppose 
there are some thousands of authors who have 
written with more or less sincerity on the man- 
agement of the human machine. But the two 
which, for me, stand out easily above all the 
rest are Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Epicte- 
tus. Not much has been discovered since their 
time. "The perfecting of life is a power resid- 
ing in the soul," wrote Marcus Aurelius in the 
ninth book of " To Himself," over seventeen hun- 
dred years ago. Marcus Aurelius is assuredly 
regarded as the greatest of writers in the human 
machine school, and not to read him daily is con- 
sidered by many to be a bad habit. As a con- 
fession his work stands alone. But as a practical 
" Bradshaw " of existence, I would put the dis- 
courses of Epictetus before M. Aurelius. Epicte- 
tus is grosser; he will call you a blockhead as 
soon as look at you; he is witty, he is even 
humorous, and he never wanders far away from 
the incidents of daily life. He is brimming over 
with actuality for readers of the year 1908. He 
was a freed slave. M, Aurelius was an Emperor, 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 99 

and he had the morbidity from which all em- 
perors must suffer. A finer soul than Epictetus, 
he is not, in my view, so useful a companion. 
Not all of us can breathe freely in his atmo- 
sphere. Nevertheless, he is of course to be read, 
and re-read continually. When you have gone 
through Epictetus — a single page or paragraph 
per day, well masticated and digested, suffices — 
you can go through M. Aurelius, and then you 
can return to Epictetus, and so on, morning by 
morning, or night by night, till your life's end. 
And they will conserve your interest in yourself. 
In the matter of concentration, I hesitate to 
recommend Mrs. Annie Besant's " Thought 
Power," and yet I should be possibly unjust if 
I did not recommend it, having regard to its 
immense influence on myself. It is not one of 
the best books of this astounding woman. It is 
addressed to theosophists, and can only be com- 
pletely understood in the light of theosophistic 
doctrines. (To grasp it all I found myself obliged 
to study a much larger work dealing with the- 
osophy as a whole.) It contains an appreciable 
quantity of what strikes me as feeble sentimen- 
talism, and also a lot of sheer dogma. But it is 
the least unsatisfactory manual of the brain that 



ioo THE HUMAN MACHINE 

I have met with. And if the profane reader ig- 
nores all that is either Greek or twaddle to him, 
there will yet remain for his advantage a vast 
amount of very sound information and advice. 
All these three books are cheap. 



XIV 
A MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 

I NOW come to an entirely different aspect 
of the whole subject. Hitherto I have 
dealt with the human machine as a con- 
trivance for adapting the man to his environ- 
ment. My aim has been to show how much de- 
pends on the machine and how little depends on 
the environment, and that the essential business 
of the machine is to utilise, for making the stuff 
of life, the particular environment in which it 
happens to find itself — and no other! All this, 
however, does not imply that one must accept, 
fatalistically and permanently and passively, 
any preposterous environment into which destiny 
has chanced to throw us. If we carry far enough 
the discipline of our brains, we can, no doubt, 
arrive at surprisingly good results in no matter 
what environment. But it would not be "right 
reason " to expend an excessive amount of will- 
power on brain-discipline when a slighter effort 
in a different direction would produce conse- 



102 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

quences more felicitous. A man whom fate had 
pitched into a canal might accomplish miracles 
in the way of rendering himself amphibian; he 
might stagger the world by the spectacle of his 
philosophy under amazing difficulties; people 
might pay sixpence a head to come and see him; 
but he would be less of a nincompoop if he 
climbed out and arranged to live definitely on the 
bank. 

The advantage of an adequate study of the 
control of the machine, such as I have outlined, 
is that it enables the student to judge, with some 
certainty, whether the unsatisfactoriness of his 
life is caused by a disordered machine or by an 
environment for which the machine is, in its 
fundamental construction, unsuitable. It does 
help him to decide justly whether, in the case of 
a grave difference between them, he, or the rest 
of the universe, is in the wrong. And also, if he 
decides that he is not in the wrong, it helps him 
to choose a new environment, or to modify the 
old, upon some scientific principle. The vast 
majority of people never know, with any pre- 
cision, why they are dissatisfied with their so- 
journ on this planet. They make long and 
fatiguing excursions in search of precious mate- 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 103 

rials which all the while are concealed in their 
own breasts. They don't know what they want; 
they only know that they want something. Or, 
if they contrive to settle in their own minds what 
they do want, a hundred to one the obtaining of 
it will leave them just as far off contentment as 
they were at the beginning! This is a matter of 
daily observation: that people are frantically 
engaged in attempting to get hold of things 
which, by universal experience, are hideously dis- 
appointing to those who have obtained posses- 
sion of them. And still the struggle goes on, and 
probably will go on. All because brains are lying 
idle ! " It is no trifle that is at stake," said Epic- 
tetus as to the question of control of instinct by 
reason. "Ii means, Are you in your senses or 
are you not?" In this significance, indubitably 
the vast majority of people are not in their 
senses ; otherwise they would not behave as they 
do, so vaguely, so happy-go-luckily, so blindly. 
But the man whose brain is in working order 
emphatically is in his senses. 

And when a man, by means of the efficiency 
of his brain, has put his reason in definite com- 
mand over his instincts, he at once sees things 
in a truer perspective than was before possible, 



104 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

and therefore he is able to set a just value upon 
the various parts which go to make up his en- 
vironment. If, for instance, he lives in London, 
and is aware of constant friction, he will be led 
to examine the claims of London as a Mecca for 
intelligent persons. He may say to himself: 
" There is something wrong, and the seat of 
trouble is not in the machine. London compels 
me to tolerate dirt, darkness, ugliness, strain, 
tedious daily journeyings, and general expen- 
siveness. What does London give me in ex- 
change?" And he may decide that, as London 
offers him nothing special in exchange except 
the glamour of London and an occasional seat at 
a good concert or a bad play, he may get a better 
return for his expenditure of brains, nerves, and 
money in the provinces. He may perceive, with 
a certain French novelist, that " most people of 
truly distinguished mind prefer the provinces." 
And he may then actually, in obedience to rea- 
son, quit the deceptions of London with a tran- 
quil heart, sure of his diagnosis. Whereas a man 
who had not devoted much time to the care of 
his mental machinery could not screw himself 
up to the step, partly from lack of resolution, and 
partly because he had never examined the sources 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 105 

of his unhappiness. A man who, not having full 
control of his machine, is consistently dissatisfied 
with his existence, is like a man who is being 
secretly poisoned and cannot decide with what or 
by whom. And so he has no middle course be- 
tween absolute starvation and a. continuance of 
poisoning. 

As with the environment of place, so with the 
environment of individuals. Most friction be- 
tween individuals is avoidable friction; some- 
times, however, friction springs from such deep 
causes that no skill in the machine can do away 
with it. But how is the man whose brain is not 
in command of his existence to judge whether the 
unpleasantness can be cured or not, whether it 
arises in himself or in the other? He simply can- 
not judge. Whereas a man who keeps his brain 
for use and not for idle amusement will, when 
he sees that friction persists in spite of his brain, 
be so clearly impressed by the advisability of sep- 
aration as the sole cure that he will steel himself 
to the effort necessary for a separation. One of 
the chief advantages of an efficient brain is that 
an efficient brain is capable of acting with firm- 
ness and resolution, partly, of course, because it 
has been toned up, but more because its opera- 



io6 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

tions are not confused by the interference of mere 
instincts. 

Thirdly, there is the environment of one's gen- 
eral purpose in life, which is, I feel convinced, 
far more often hopelessly wrong and futile than 
either the environment of situation or the en- 
vironment of individuals. I will be bold enough 
to say that quite seventy per cent of ambition is 
never realised at all, and that ninety-nine per 
cent of all realised ambition is fruitless. In other 
words, that a gigantic sacrifice of the present to 
the future is always going on. And here again 
the utility of brain-discipline is most strikingly 
shown. A man whose first business it is every 
day to concentrate his mind on the proper per- 
formance of that particular day, must necessarily 
conserve his interest in the present. It is im- 
possible that his perspective should become so 
warped that he will devote, say, fifty-five years 
of his career to problematical preparations for 
his comfort and his glory during the final ten 
years. A man whose brain is his servant, and 
not his lady-help or his pet dog, will be in receipt 
of such daily content and satisfaction that he will 
early ask himself the question : " As for this am- 
bition that is eating away my hours, what will it 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 107 

give me that I have not already got? " Further, 
the steady development of interest in the hobby 
(call it!) of common-sense daily living will act 
as an automatic test of any ambition. If an am- 
bition survives and flourishes on the top of that 
daily cultivation of the machine, then the owner 
of the ambition may be sure that it is a genuine 
and an invincible ambition, and he may pursue 
it in full faith ; his developed care for the present 
will prevent him from making his ambition an 
altar on which the whole of the present is to be 
offered up. 

I shall be told that I want to do away with 
ambition, and that ambition is the great motive- 
power of existence, and that therefore I am an 
enemy of society and the truth is not in me. But 
I do not want to do away with ambition. What 
I say is that current ambitions usually result in 
disappointment, that they usually mean the com- 
plete distortion of a life. This is an incontestable 
fact, and the reason of it is that ambitions are 
chosen either without knowledge of their real 
value or without knowledge of what they will 
cost. A disciplined brain will at once show the 
unnecessariness of most ambitions, and will en- 
sure that the remainder shall be conducted with 



108 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

reason. It will also convince its possessor that 
the ambition to live strictly according to the 
highest common sense during the next twenty- 
four hours is an ambition that needs a lot of 
beating. 



XV 

L.S.D. 

Mk NYBOD Y who really wishes to talk simple 
#jk truth about money at the present time is 
■™ ""confronted by a very serious practical 
difficulty. He must put himself in opposition 
to the overwhelming body of public opinion, and 
resign himself to being regarded either as a 
poseur, a crank, or a fool. The public is in 
search of happiness now, as it was a million 
years ago. Money is not the principal factor in 
happiness. It may be argued whether, as a fac- 
tor in happiness, money is of twentieth-rate 
importance or fiftieth-rate importance. But it 
cannot be argued whether money, in point of fact, 
does or does not of itself bring happiness. There 
can be no doubt whatever that money does not 
bring happiness. Yet, in face of this incontro- 
vertible and universal truth, the whole public 
behaves exactly as if money were the sole or the 
principal preliminary to happiness. The public 
does not reason, and it will not listen to reason ; 



no THE HUMAN MACHINE 

its blood is up in the money-hunt, and the phi- 
losopher might as well expostulate with an earth- 
quake as try to take that public by the button- 
hole and explain. If a man sacrifices his interest * 
under the will of some dead social tyrant in order 
to marry whom he wishes, if an English minister 
of religion declines twenty-five thousand dollars 
a year to go into exile and preach to New York 
millionaires, the phenomenon is genuinely held 
to be so astounding that it at once flies right 
round the world in the form of exclamatory news- 
paper articles ! In an age when such an attitude 
towards money is sincere, it is positively danger- 
ous — I doubt if it may not be harmful — to per- 
sist with loud obstinacy that money, instead of 
being the greatest, is the least thing in the world. 
In times of high military excitement a man may 
be ostracised if not lynched for uttering opinions 
which everybody will accept as truisms a couple 
of years later, and thus the wise philosopher 
holds his tongue — lest it should be cut out. So 
at the zenith of a period when the possession of 
money in absurd masses is an infallible means 
to the general respect, I have no intention either 
of preaching or of practising quite all that I pri- 
vately believe in the matter of riches. 



THE HUMAN MACHINE in 

It was not always thus. Though there have 
been previous ages as lustful for wealth and os- 
tentation as our own, there have also been ages 
when money-getting and millionaire-envying 
were not the sole preoccupations of the average 
man. And such an age will undoubtedly succeed 
to ours. Few things would surprise me less, in 
social life, than the upspringing of some anti- 
luxury movement, the formation of some league 
or guild among the middling classes (where alone 
intellect is to be found in quantity), the members 
of which would bind themselves to stand aloof 
from all the great, silly, banal, ugly, and tedious 
luxe -activities of the time, and not to spend more 
than a certain sum per annum on eating, drink- 
ing, covering their bodies, and being moved about 
like parcels from one spot of the earth's surface 
to another. Such a movement would, and will, 
help towards the formation of an opinion which 
would condemn lavish expenditure on personal 
satisfactions as bad form. However, the share- 
holders of grand hotels, restaurants, and race- 
courses of all sorts, together with popular singers 
and barristers, etc., need feel no immediate alarm. 
The movement is not yet. 

As touching the effect of money on the efficient 



ii2 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

ordering of the human machine, there is happily 
no necessity to inform those who have begun to 
interest themselves in the conduct of their own 
brains that money counts for very little in that 
paramount affair. Nothing that really helps 
towards perfection costs more than is within the 
means of every person who reads these pages. 
The expenses connected with daily meditation, 
with the building-up of mental habits, with the 
practice of self-control and of cheerfulness, with 
the enthronement of reason over the rabble of 
primeval instincts — these expenses are really, 
you know, trifling. And whether you get that 
well-deserved rise of a pound a week or whether 
you don't, you may anyhow go ahead with the 
machine ; it is n't a motor-car, though I started 
by comparing it to one. And even when, having 
to a certain extent mastered, through sensible 
management of the machine, the art of achieving 
a daily content and dignity, you come to the 
embroidery of life — even the best embroidery 
of life is not absolutely ruinous. Meat may go 
up in price — it has done — but books won't. 
Admission to picture galleries and concerts and 
so forth will remain quite low. The views from 
Richmond Hill or Hindhead, or along Pall Mall 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 113 

at sunset, the smell of the earth, the taste of fruit 
and of kisses — these things are unaffected by 
the machinations of trusts and the hysteria of 
stock exchanges. Travel, which after books is 
the finest of all embroideries (and which is not 
to be valued by the mile but by the quality), is 
decidedly cheaper than ever it was. All that is 
required is ingenuity in one's expenditure. And 
much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more 
profitable and amusing than much money with- 
out ingenuity. 

And all the while as you read this you are say- 
ing, with your impatient sneer : " It 's all very 
well ; it 's all very fine talking, but . . . ." In 
brief, you are not convinced. You cannot de- 
racinate that wide-rooted dogma within your 
soul that more money means more joy. I regret 
it. But let me put one question, and let me ask 
you to answer it honestly. Your financial means 
are greater now than they used to be. Are you 
happier or less discontented than you used to 
be? Taking your existence day by day, hour by 
hour, judging it by the mysterious feel (in the 
chest) of responsibilities, worries, positive joys 
and satisfactions, are you genuinely happier than 
you used to be? 



ii4 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

I do not wish to be misunderstood. The finan- 
cial question cannot be ignored. If it is true that 
money does not bring happiness, it is no less 
true that the lack of money induces a state of 
affairs in which efficient living becomes doubly 
difficult. These two propositions, superficially 
perhaps self-contradictory, are not really so. A 
modest income suffices for the fullest realisation 
of the Ego in terms of content and dignity; but 
you must live within it. You cannot righteously 
ignore money. A man, for instance, who culti- 
vates himself and instructs a family of daughters 
in everything except the ability to earn their own 
livelihood, and then has the impudence to die 
suddenly without leaving a penny — that man is 
a scoundrel. Ninety — or should I say ninety- 
nine? — per cent of all those anxieties which ren- 
der proper living almost impossible are caused 
by the habit of walking on the edge of one's in- 
come as one might walk on the edge of a preci- 
pice. The majority of Englishmen have some 
financial worry or other continually, everlastingly 
at the back of their minds. The sacrifice neces- 
sary to abolish this condition of things is more 
apparent than real. All spending is a matter of 
habit. 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 115 

Speaking generally, a man can contrive, out of 
an extremely modest income, to have all that he 
needs — unless he needs the esteem of snobs. 
Habit may, and habit usually does, make it just 
as difficult to keep a family on two thousand a 
year as on two hundred. I suppose that for the 
majority of men the suspension of income for a 
single month would mean either bankruptcy, the 
usurer, or acute inconvenience. Impossible, 
under such circumstances, to be in full and 
independent possession of one's immortal soul! 
Hence I should be inclined to say that the first 
preliminary to a proper control of the machine is 
the habit of spending decidedly less than one 
earns or receives. The veriest automaton of a 
clerk ought to have the wherewithal of a whole 
year as a shield against the caprices of his em- 
ployer. It would be as reasonable to expect the 
inhabitants of an unfortified city in the midst of 
a plain occupied by a hostile army to apply them- 
selves successfully to the study of logarithms or 
metaphysics, as to expect a man without a year's 
income in his safe to apply himself successfully 
to the true art of living. 

And the whole secret of relative freedom from 
financial anxiety lies not in income, but in ex- 



n6 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

penditure. I am ashamed to utter this antique 
platitude. But, like most aphorisms of unassail- 
able wisdom, it is completely ignored. You say, 
of course, that it is not easy to leave a margin 
between your expenditure and your present in- 
come. I know it. I fraternally shake your hand. 
Still, it is, in most cases, far easier to lessen one's 
expenditure than to increase one's income with- 
out increasing one's expenditure. The alterna- 
tive is before you. However you decide, be as- 
sured that the foundation of philosophy is a 
margin, and that the margin can always be had. 



XVI 
REASON, REASON! 

IN conclusion, I must insist upon several 
results of what I may call the " intensive 
culture " of the reason. The brain will not 
only grow more effectively powerful in the de- 
partments of life where the brain is supposed 
specially to work, but it will also enlarge the 
circle of its activities. It will assuredly interfere 
in everything. The student of himself must nec- 
essarily conduct his existence more and more 
according to the views of his brain. This will 
be most salutary and agreeable both for himself 
and for the rest of the world. You object. You 
say it will be a pity when mankind refers every- 
thing to reason. You talk about the heart. You 
envisage an entirely reasonable existence as a 
harsh and callous existence. Not so. When the 
reason and the heart come into conflict the heart 
is invariably wrong. I do not say that the reason 
is always entirely right, but I do say that it is 
always less wrong than the heart. The empire 



n8 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

of the reason is not universal, but within its 
empire reason is supreme, and if other forces 
challenge it on its own soil they must take the 
consequences. Nearly always, when the heart 
opposes the brain, the heart is merely a pretty 
name which we give to our idleness and our 
egotism. 

We pass along the Strand and see a respectable 
young widow standing in the gutter, with a baby 
in her arms and a couple of boxes of matches in 
one hand. We know she is a widow because of 
her weeds, and we know she is respectable by 
her clothes. We know she is not begging be- 
cause she is selling matches. - The sight of her in 
the gutter pains our heart. Our heart weeps and 
gives the woman a penny in exchange for a half- 
penny box of matches, and the pain of our heart 
is thereby assuaged. Our heart has performed a 
good action. But later on our reason (unfortu- 
nately asleep at the moment) wakes up and says : 
" That baby was hired ; the weeds and matches 
merely a dodge. The whole affair was a spec- 
tacle got up to extract money from a fool like 
you. It is as mechanical as a penny in the slot. 
Instead of relieving distress you have simply 
helped to perpetuate an infamous system. You 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 119 

ought to know that you can't do good in that off- 
hand way." The heart gives pennies in the 
street. The brain runs the Charity Organisation 
Society. Of course, to give pennies in the street 
is much less trouble than to run the C.O.S. As 
a method of producing a quick, inexpensive, and 
pleasing effect on one's egotism the C.O.S. is 
simply not in it with this dodge of giving pennies 
at random, without inquiry. Only — which of 
the two devices ought to be accused of harshness 
and callousness? Which of them is truly kind? 
I bring forward the respectable young widow as 
a sample case of the Heart <v. Brain conflict. All 
other cases are the same. The brain is always 
more kind than the heart; the brain is always 
more willing than the heart to put itself to a 
great deal of trouble for a very little reward ; the 
brain always does the difficult, unselfish thing, 
and the heart always does the facile, showy 
thing. Naturally the result of the brain's activity 
on society is always more advantageous than the 
result of the heart's activity. 

Another point. I have tried to show that, if 
the reason is put in command of the feelings, it 
is impossible to assume an attitude of blame 
towards any person whatsoever for any act what- 



120 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

soever. The habit of blaming must depart abso- 
lutely. It is no argument against this statement 
that it involves anarchy and the demolition of 
society. Even if it did (which emphatically it 
does not), that would not affect its truth. All 
great truths have been assailed on the ground 
that to accept them meant the end of everything. 
As if that mattered! As I make no claim to be 
the discoverer of this truth I have no hesitation 
in announcing it to be one of the most important 
truths that the world has yet to learn. However, 
the real reason why many people object to this 
truth is not because they think it involves the 
utter demolition of society (fear of the utter 
demolition of society never stopped anyone from 
doing or believing anything, and never will), but 
because they say to themselves that if they can't 
blame they can't praise. And they do so like 
praising! If they are so desperately fond of 
praising, it is a pity that they don't praise a little 
more! There can be no doubt that the average 
man blames much more than he praises. His 
instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says 
nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks 
up a row. So that even if the suppression of 
blame involved the suppression of praise the 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 121 

change would certainly be a change for the better. 
But I can perceive no reason why the suppression 
of blame should involve the suppression of praise. 
On the contrary, I think that the habit of prais- 
ing should be fostered. (I do not suggest the 
occasional use of trowels, but the regular use of 
salt-spoons.) Anyhow, the triumph of the brain 
over the natural instincts (in an ideally organised 
man the brain and the natural instincts will never 
have even a tiff) always means the ultimate tri- 
umph of kindness. 

And, further, the culture of the brain, the con- 
stant disciplinary exercise of the reasoning fac- 
ulty, means the diminution of misdeeds. (Do 
not imagine I am hinting that you are on the 
verge of murdering your wife or breaking into 
your neighbour's house. Although you person- 
ally are guiltless, there is a good deal of sin still 
committed in your immediate vicinity.) Said 
Balzac in " La Cousine Bette," " A crime is in the 
first instance a defect of reasoning powers." In 
the appreciation of this truth, Marcus Aurelius 
was, as usual, a bit beforehand with Balzac. M. 
Aurelius said, " No soul wilfully misses truth." 
And Epictetus had come to the same conclusion 
before M. Aurelius, and Plato before Epictetus. 



122 THE HUMAN MACHINE 

All wrongdoing is done in the sincere belief that it 
is the best thing to do. Whatever sin a man does 
he does either for his own benefit or for the bene- 
fit of society. At the moment of doing it he is 
convinced that it is the only thing to do. He is 
mistaken. And he is mistaken because his brain 
has been unequal to the task of reasoning the 
matter out. Passion (the heart) is responsible 
for all crimes. Indeed, crime is simply a conven- 
ient monosyllable which we apply to what hap- 
pens when the brain and the heart come into 
conflict and the brain is defeated. That trans- 
action of the matches was a crime, you know. 

Lastly, the culture of the brain must result in 
the habit of originally examining all the phe- 
nomena of life and conduct, to see what they 
really are, and to what they lead. The heart 
hates progress, because the dear old thing always 
wants to do as has always been done. The heart 
is convinced that custom is a virtue. The heart 
of the dirty working man rebels when the State 
insists that he shall be clean, for no other reason 
than that it is his custom to be dirty. Useless to 
tell his heart that, clean, he will live longer ! He 
has been dirty and he will be. The brain alone 
is the enemy of prejudice and precedent, which 



THE HUMAN MACHINE 123 

alone are the enemies of progress. And this 
habit of originally examining phenomena is per- 
haps the greatest factor that goes to the making 
of personal dignity; for it fosters reliance on 
one's self and courage to accept the consequences 
of the act of reasoning. Reason is the basis of 
personal dignity. 

I finish. I have said nothing of the modifica- 
tions which the constant use of the brain will 
bring about in the general values of existence. 
Modifications slow and subtle, but tremendous! 
The persevering will discover them. It will hap- 
pen to the persevering that their whole lives are 
changed — texture and colour, too ! Naught will 
happen to those who do not persevere. 



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